AP-GfK = Absolutely Pathetic Garbage for Koolaiders
A May 5-9 poll released on May 11 by a polling partnership of the Associated Press and GfK Roper Public Affairs & Corporate Communications purports to show that Americans’ approval of President Barack Obama’s performance in office has risen to 60%, up from 53% in March and 47% in January.
As would be expected among the left-dominated press corps, all of a sudden the other daily presidential approval polls, virtually all of which show Obama in the high 40s and low 50s in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden (51% at Gallup, 46%-48% at Zogby, and 52% at Rasmussen, with a 37%-25% difference between those who strongly disapprove and those who strongly approve), mean nothing. Former Bill Clinton aide (and Gary Aldrich smearer, Linda Chavez targeter, and Good Morning America co-host) George Stephanopoulos crowed: “[A] new poll out just this morning shows President Obama with his highest approval rating in two years.”
AP reporters acted as if they had died and gone to heaven, issuing at least three lengthy items on various aspects of the poll’s results. Wednesday morning’s opening missive by Liz Sidoti and Jennifer Agiesta kicked things off, informing readers that a “comfortable” majority of the public “now call(s) Obama a strong leader who will keep America safe,” that America “now approve(s) of Obama’s stewardship of the economy.” With the 2012 presidential election still eighteen months away, “more people say he should get a second term than not” by a margin of 53%-43%! Maybe we should just cancel the elections and sing “All hail, King Barack!” Zheesh.
That evening, Robert Burns and Ms. Agiesta waxed ecstatically over the impact of the successful bin Laden operation: “Few events have sparked such soaring approval from the nation, and almost nothing has since George W. Bush’s handling of the U.S. campaign against terrorism in the months following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.” Almost nothing was a mighty convenient term to employ, giving the AP pair the ability to gloss over the fact that George W. Bush’s approval rating at Gallup rocketed from 58% to 71% in a single week in March 2003 as military operations commenced in Iraq.
Thursday morning, the wire service’s Jim Kuhnhenn engaged in an attempt to talk up the economy:
[T]he public’s brighter economic outlook also could signal a boost to the current recovery, which relies to a great degree on consumer behavior. A public that is confident about economic performance is more likely to spend more and accelerate the economy’s resurgence.
Well, if anyone should know, it would be an AP reporter, given that the wire service fully cooperated with the progenitors of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy in relentlessly talking down and erasing the business community’s optimism beginning in the spring of 2008 — up to and including what is probably still AP’s worst story ever: “Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control.”
It seems that the folks at AP and GfK are unusually on edge over their partnership’s most recent production. The report by Burns and Agiesta includes the following priceless paragraph:
Some conservatives criticized the AP-GfK poll as heavy with responses from Democrats that skewed the results. AP-GfK polls use a consistent methodology that draws a random sample of the population independent of party identification. … [T]he change in party identification in the current AP-GfK poll is not a statistically significant shift from the previous poll in March and could not by itself explain the poll findings.
Note that the AP reporters didn’t have the nerve to tell readers how “skewed” May’s poll was. Forty-six percent of those surveyed identified themselves as Democrats, 29% as Republicans, and 4% as independents (after classifying leaners); 20% didn’t know. By contrast, the latest available party identification results from Rasmussen as of April have the GOP at 34.8%, Dems at 33.5%, and 31.7% as not affiliated. Gallup, in an aggregate of 21 separate polls conducted last year, shows a Democrat-Republican split of 45%-44%.
I never pay much attention to polls. The only ones that really matter are when you punch the ticket on election day. Everything else is window dressing, and a kabuki theater to keep the media wonks employed parsing every politician’s every move.
The leftwing pollsters in Canada’s May 2nd election ALL lied about voters’ intentions, but the public ignored them and voted in a majority conservative government.
The leftwing pollsters in Canada’s May 2nd election ALL lied about voters’ intentions, but the public ignored them and voted in a majority conservative government.
While a majority Conservative government was indeed elected, the leftist NDP more than doubled – in terms of number of elected MPs (Members of Parliament) – compared to the highest number of MPs they’d ever had before. Much of that was at the expensive of other leftist parties, like the Bloc Quebec and the Liberals, but it remains that the socialist NDP is now the Official Opposition (the second biggest party) for the first time in Canadian history.
For anyone wondering about the implications of that, here’s an article from the Toronto Star – our equivalent to the New York Times – showing one of the newly elected NDP MPs in the photo: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/985085–newly-elected-ndp-mps-from-campus-to-commons. Yes, that obviously immature child sporting the “I still hate George Bush” T-shirt and the toy gun is now a member of the national Parliament and belongs to the second biggest party in the new government! She is joined by a substantial number of new NDP MPs from Quebec with similar dubious qualifications. The best known of the new NDP MPs has already earned the nickname “Vegas” because she went to Las Vegas to celebrate her birthday DURING the campaign. (Campaigns here last only five weeks, not nearly 2 years like in the US!). But it didn’t really matter that she was in Vegas during the campaign because she never once set foot in the riding (equivalent to congressional district) that she was running in! In fact, she lived three hours drive away and had NEVER set foot in her new riding, before or during the campaign. Apparently, the NDP organization had not erected so much as a lawn sign on her behalf in the riding. Another of the new MPs was expecting to caddy at a golf course if he couldn’t find any other summer job. Now these unlikely parliamentarians are making $150,000 a year as MPs!!
I am very VERY glad that the Conservatives finally won a majority. If they hadn’t, these young know-it-all activist types might actually have beeng able to enact legislation to accomplish their ideological goals. That’s one of the most appalling things I can imagine for my country.
And now it’s my turn to agree with you, David.
About the only time I mention a poll on my humble little blog is to point out wild inaccuracies in the samples, like this one. Other than that, I tend to ignore them.
The key point of Tom’s wonderful evisceration of the propaganda machine’s INTENTIONAL effort to distort…is how it works it’s way down the conveyor belt of lies, misrepresentations, omissions, falsehoods, and phony attributions.
Watch the magic of bootstrapping distortion into bootlicking disingenuous and breathless pronouncement.
Make a phony poll, distort the meaning of the phony poll, pass off the lie contained within the distorted meaning of the phony poll to your talking heads and poison pen scribes…and watch the Chia Pet propaganda grow!
All we need to wash this sleaze away…is a Russian hacker to leak the emails that say “hide the decline!”, in the propaganda machine…and it will stop them…well, slow them….ah, heck…it won’t even phase them. They will keep on lying to us with impunity.
You mean to tell me that the AP is biased? Say it ain’t so! And this is news? The 2008 election was all the proof you needed about that. The “Reverand” Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Obama’s pathetic political background of no accomplishments, the list goes on and on, yet the AP, along with the rest of the main stream media, said nothing. In fact not only did they support Obama with fawning news reports, but this adulation also continued into his presidency. How many AP new articles have you seen that were critical of Obama’s “stimulus” program, which stimulated nothing but even more debt and a few union jobs? Or how about more recently, with Obama getting involved in a THIRD useless Middle Eastern war? Not a peep. If this were a Republican president, you’d be hearing the AP screaming for this guy’s resignation. Which is why fewer and fewer people are listening to the main stream media. Hope they enjoy their ride into irrelevance.
It’s a “liars contest” between the bootlicking media and the Obama “Corpse Men”.
They can really tell some big ones. And sometimes they are even funny! But, usually they are lame and pathetic.
Ignuranse and stoopidity on parade.
Easy to see why they are pandering to illegal aliens; They don’t speak or understand English too well.
Articles with detail like this, are what needs to be published every day. Regardless of what Party is in power.
Thank you Pajamas Media and Tom Blumer for this praiseworthy journalism.
I put the polling from the MSM on the same level as emails i receive from Nigerian royalty looking for help to free up their inheritance.
wildman.. if you haven’t seen the short lived television series, ‘Flight of the Conchords’, I highly recommend it. It touches on those farce emails with an utterly unexpected result.
Tom, I salute you my friend. For you to engage in ANY reading and reasoning of an AP op-ed, err, ‘news piece’ is above and beyond, Sir.
Matt Drudge, God bless him, also has AP headlines to peruse. Though I believe it’s more for a comical standpoint.
I believe in ‘balanced news’ but on drudgereport I just highlight over the headline and if an AP piece.. no thanks.
The typical AP ‘article” provides almost NO backdrop, history nor consequences of past dealings in said article. But man it sure praises the actions, well at the very least the ‘intentions’ and ‘discussions’ of the UN, the ‘wanting peace’ Hamas, the ‘misunderstood/mislabeled’ Pakistan ISI, Obama’s ‘capitalist’ intentions etc etc., Yep.. no bias there. No siree..
An AP article is on par to reading my nieces monthly Elementary school news bulletin.
Tom Blumer’s excellent analysis begs the question: Why is AP et al trying to deliberately falsify data to “prove” Obama is loved by the masses? Could it be that AP et al really think that Obama’s socialism is a good idea for America?
Just when was the last time that a poll asked, “Do you want capitalism or socialism to rule the USA?” Answer: never.
Did George Soros buy the support of the AP? George owns just about all the other Leftist media. So, I never pay any attention to them.
“Truly random sampling from the beginning of 2010 through May 2011 should have resulted in a least a few of AP-GfK’s samples skewing Republican. Yet it did not happen even once.”
The sixth one from the left, if I am reading it right, does. (And it is a Likely Voters poll, which I would think would be even more precise.)
However, I agree with the point of the article. Good work.
That’s hilarious. RE: the last paragraph, please l learn what statistical normalizing means and stop sounding like you failed 8th grade.
If you learned English grammar at the same school, I can see why you find the article hilarious rather than troubling.
I wouldn’t worry too much about it. They Polled people with “LAND LINES”. Those are the people who sleep until 1pm, and then go outside, sit on the stoop drinking a beer, and wait for the Mailman to bring the check.
You know. Democrats.
The minute I saw the poll was an AP/GsK sponsored endeavor, I knew it was skewed in favor of Obama. And, the regular readers of Pajamas Media writers knew they were skewed as well. The problem is not with us but with the ones who don’t bother to at least make an attempt to understand the bias of the MSM toward Obama or are too blind to see the connection between a very liberal press with an unwaivering devotion to one of their own.
Written criticisms of Obama so seldom see the light of day and are so rare, autographed copies could be auctioned at Sotheby’s for a handsome profit, provided Sotheby’s would allow them to be auctioned.
These debased fools actually think they are superior to us, after all, they graduated from journalism school. They are taught that their mission is,barf, to make a difference, to change society. What sort of maniacal urge would justify that idea within the fried brains of even the lowest moron? Bad enough, but does it have to be the federal government as engine of supposed progress?
The big worry is not the polls. More critical is that the Republican party appears to be coming apart. Potential Presidential candidates insulting one another constantly. And, now we have Newt Gingrich supporting the principle concept in Obama’s healthcare program and attacking Paul Ryan’s plan to reform Medicare. Why is all this happening?
Coming apart ?
We are just DEBATING.
We aren’t a stupid herd like the socialist totalitarians, who “think” they have figured out everything and have a recipe to solve all the problems of the universe.
We really think, instead. And that implies a rich and deep debate.
The democrat campaign machine (aka the mainstream media) treats the Free People of this Free Republic as sheep that can be fooled by the tricks of the nazi propaganda minister Goebbels (“repeat a lie, it will become true”.)
Shame on them.
The interesting phenomenon to me is how exuberantly enthusiastic the media are about Obama’s “great foreign policy success” in the form of Navy Seals killing UBL. Anyone who has ever played (or even carefully watched) sports knows something about praise after the event. If you are a baseball player, and you have been having a winning season, and you hit a home run, your team mates barely give you a high-five. They know you are good. You know you are good. Hysterics are not necessary. On the other hand, if you have been having a LONG DRY SPELL, and suddenly you have a base hit, the bench goes wild! “Hey, the guy got a hit! Great! He is not a totally worthless piece of *&^%$ after all!” Roughly similar to protesting too much.
Media half wits have invested a lot in Baby Obama, his failure and incompetence reflects on them, they can’t walk away from this living disaster.
Bill O’Reilly had this information last week on his program. Anyone who watches polling knows that most polls are the product of politics and don’t reflect anything about the real world except that every facet of life is controlled by political hacks.
It would make more sense for the left-leaning polsters to just ask how the Democrats are going to MAKE people vote and report that instead of guessing.