The View From 1776

This problem was addressed in Can Voters Make the Decision to Pull Out of Iraq?.

No matter what politicians and the media make of them, opinion polls, for example, evidencing very low approvals for President Bush and his Iraq policies are not of themselves a rational basis for pulling out of Iraq.  One highly important reason is that the public hears mostly one side of the argument.  Politicians, media, and pressure groups urging a troop pull-out have never addressed the follow-on costs to national security, our economy, and our future diplomatic relations with the rest of the world.

As the issue has been presented, it is the equivalent of asking the public if they would like to live a life of ease at the beach, without informing them of the cost to do so.

Thomas Sowell’s recent column gives an example of the irrationality, in an economic issue, of equating opinion with reason.

In addition to the fact that most opinion poll respondents don’t have an understanding of the subject of the poll, several factors inherent in polling account for the disconnect between public opinion and reality.

First, before the pollsters ask their questions, the media will already have created a prevailing opinion by publishing one-sided, slanted information to support their views.  For example, many historians believe that there would have been no Spanish-American War in 1898 without the Hearst newspapers’ hammering the public with calls for vengeance for the presumed sabotage that blew up the USS Maine in Havana harbor.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, understood this very well.  He is reported to have said, If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

According to the Wikipedia, The phrase Big Lie refers to a propaganda technique which entered mass consciousness with Adolf Hitler’s 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf. In that book Hitler wrote that people came to believe that Germany lost World War I in the field due to a propaganda technique used by Jews who were influential in the German press. This technique, he believed, consisted of telling a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”. The first documented use of the phrase “big lie” is in the corresponding passage: “in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility.

Second, when statisticians massage the raw data of opinion polls we tend to accept the results as true, because presumably they have been derived “scientifically.”

In the emotions of the moment we forget, however, that too often those poll results are the product of a circular process that, by design or chance, merely supports the opinions of those who commission the polls. 

Start with the poll questions.  What is asked, what is not asked, and the way questions are worded hugely influence the poll results.

The pollsters might ask, “Would you like to have free medical insurance?” or they could more honestly ask, “Would you like to have Federal medical insurance with no premiums, but with the possibility that its costs will bankrupt the Medicare-Medicaid systems?”

In many polls, respondents are not given enough questions to bring out degrees of opinion about different aspects of an issue.  Too often the polls tend toward a single viewpoint, with a question such as “Would you use Brand X?” without follow-up questions to elicit responses about why the respondent might not use Brand X, or what other brand he might prefer, and why.  The nature of polls requires either yes or no answers or choices from a limited number of options.

Third, poll results are influenced by the number of people polled, the polling techniques, the geographic locations of those polled, and the timing of the poll. 

In a nation of more than 300 million people, most polls are based on a sampling of a few hundred people; few polls sample more than a couple of thousand people.  Statistical techniques can assess the probable degree of accuracy, but the familiar caveat, “plus or minus X percent,” compounds the inaccuracies introduced by the types and biases of the poll questions.

A particularly egregious example of statistical nonsense was last year’s front page news everywhere that American military operations in Iraq had resulted in 654,965 Iraqi deaths.  The Tim Blair website explained:

The actual number of Iraqi deaths recorded in Lancet’s latest study is just 547. Extrapolating from that figure, the study’s authors estimate:
... that as of July, 2006, there have been 654,965 excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war.

* It is a larger number than were killed in Germany during five years (and 955,044 tons) of WWII bombing.

Timing is a critical factor.  A poll immediately after 9/11 is more likely to elicit a bellicose public response than one a year later. 

Location is another.  People in large cities and in the Blue States have different views from those elsewhere.

Fourth, when opinion polls inform the public that the majority of respondents express opinion X, people who know nothing about the issue, and may never have thought about it, tend to adopt the announced poll result as their opinion.  The effect is the blind leading the blind.

Finally, to influence public opinion, news media sometimes present editorial biases as “news” and deliberately distort statistics, as we saw in New York Times at it Again.

In that case, the Times headlined a feature article 51% of Women Are Now Living Without Spouse. The Times reached that dishonest conclusion by including in the database of women more than 10 million girls between the ages of 15 and 19, 97% of whom not surprisingly identified themselves in Census data as “never married.”

Another example: 

Powerline’s March 29, 2006, posting tells us, Here is how the Washington Times reported the judges’ testimony, in a story headlined “FISA Judges Say Bush Within Law”:

A panel of former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges yesterday told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that President Bush did not act illegally when he created by executive order a wiretapping program conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA)....

Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times appears to have attended a different hearing. The Times’ story is headlined Judges on Secretive Panel Speak Out on Spy Program. Lichtblau reports:

Five former judges on the nation’s most secretive court, including one who resigned in apparent protest over President Bush’s domestic eavesdropping, urged Congress on Tuesday to give the court a formal role in overseeing the surveillance program.

Mr. Lichtblau’s story is an editorial masquerading as “news” to conform public opinion to the strident denunciations of the NSA surveillance programs by the Times’s editorial staff.

One more example:

Michell Malkin, in a December 28, 2005, column, wrote, On July 6, Army reserve officer Phillip Carter authored a freelance op-ed for the Times calling on President Bush to promote military recruitment efforts. The next day, the paper was forced to admit that one of its editors had inserted misleading language into the piece against Carter’s wishes. The “correction”:

“The Op-Ed page in some copies yesterday carried an incorrect version of an article about military recruitment. The writer, an Army reserve officer, did not say, ‘Imagine my surprise the other day when I received orders to report to Fort Campbell, Ky., next Sunday,’ nor did he characterize his recent call-up to active duty as the precursor to a ‘surprise tour of Iraq.’ That language was added by an editor and was to have been removed before the article was published. Because of a production error, it was not. The Times regrets the error."

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