In 1997, one of America’s first major public opinion polling organizations, Gallup, did a “poll on polls.” Not surprisingly, respondents said polls are accurate in measuring public opinion.
Last month, Retro Poll, a newly-formed California-based grassroots polling organization, did a different sort of “poll on polls,” asking a slightly different question: Does the public opinion reported in the major media polls reflect the true beliefs of those polled?
Using the same random sample data and methodology as established polling outfits like Gallup, Retro Poll’s results indicated that Americans’ true beliefs are not reflected in major opinion polls. What polls do accurately illustrate, the pollsters say, is the degree to which Americans accept major media misinformation and disinformation as fact.
Conducted between Sept. 20 and Oct. 6 of this year, Retro Poll used the Bush Administration’s proposed war on Iraq as its central polling issue. Of a random sample of 150 people from 39 states, the 65 participants who believed in a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda — as suggested by the Bush administration — supported a war by a margin of 2:1. This is approximately the same margin by which ABC reported Americans supported a war according as of Sept.27.
However, those 33 Retro Poll participants who did not buy an association between Hussein and Al Qaeda rejected a war by a margin of 4:1. The rest remained undecided.
This difference, according to Retro Poll, “suggests that by continually highlighting Washington’s viewpoint unchallenged, the news bureaus can change the facts in the minds of many Americans. The opinions formed from those unsubstantiated facts are then used by polling organizations to report back the values, ideas and thinking of the public.”
Mark Sapir, a physician and long-time activist, who first had the idea for the alternative polling project, explains, “Corporate media don’t look at antecedent events. They just say, ‘This is what the public thinks.’ The idea of Retro Poll is that you’ve got to look behind.”
Other Retro Poll results revealed that 82.7 percent felt the U.S. should have to prove its charges against another country before attacking it. Some 89.2 percent supported the idea that the U.S. should use international efforts to prosecute war crimes instead of unilateral prosecution.
When asked about issues related to the “War on Terror,” 80.4 percent of respondents rejected the use of outlawed techniques such as torture against detainees. Meanwhile, 71 percent opposed detention of arrestees without charges, proofs or trials.
These answers, say the Retro Pollsters, demonstrate that Americans’ basic values still “remain strongly democratic and fair,” says the organization. Certainly, they suggest some opposition to the Department of Justice’s war on civil liberties.
Sapir notes, “These questions show the same thing. The American people are not for Bush’s wars. It’s only the misinformation that’s causing this.”
While not suggesting that any poll can be purely objective, Retro Poll did attempt to avoid the pitfalls that invalidate corporate polls. “We tried to be more up front and honest with respondents,” says Retro Poll advisor, professor and author of Constructing Public Opinion, Justin Lewis, “rather than being coy about why the poll is being conducted, and for who, as most pollsters are.”
Although corporate pollsters usually use a sample of 800-1,000 respondents, Retro Poll’s sample of 150 respondents is adequate to yield significant results. According to the National Council on Public Polls, a larger sample does not yield more accurate results, but “because polls only give approximate answers,” will only decrease the margin of error.
So, while Retro Poll’s results have a +/- 6-8 percent margin of error, slightly larger than the +/- 3 percent margin of error usually yielded from major media polls, its results remain statistically significant, especially when one considers the number of 70- and 80-percent responses, says Lewis.
“There’s a lot of media criticism out there. But we wanted to show… exactly what they [corporate media] do, and show that if we could do it a different way, we could get different answers,” said Sapir. “With Retro Poll, we can at least counteract disinformation and construct an alternative view.”
For more info, go to www.retropoll.org.
