Is this new? "How CNN Doctored up a 'Hillary Bounce' and Got Away with it"
How CNN Doctored up a “Hillary Bounce” and Got Away with it
September 22, 2015 * Accidental Socialist
Like many firm supporters of Bernie Sanders these days,one of my first activities after rolling out of bed is to Google Bernie’s name and click the “news” tab. I woke up today to the top story from CNN titled “Poll: Hillary Clinton’s lead over Bernie Sanders Grows.” Having become used to this type of treatment of Bernie from the corporate media, I clicked it to read and examine whether the headline actually matches the content. My first impression was that this “lead growth” isn’t really very conclusive. Then I looked more closely at the data, and I realized something I could hardly believe – they skewed the results.
The gist of the story was that Clinton’s lead over Sanders, which had been 37% to 27% in this poll, had grown to 42% to 24%. However, the story went on, when Biden is not included on the ballot, that lead balloons to a whopping 57% to 28%. Initially I was willing to take these figures at face value because they comported with the facts that I believe to be true at the moment. The CNN poll has a margin of +/- 5% for this particular question, and both Hillary’s and Bernie’s numbers were within those margin. Secondly, other polls had demonstrated that Joe Biden’s support has significant overlap with Hillary Clinton’s and that his candidacy siphons far more votes away from Clinton than Sanders.
However, something just didn’t sit right with me. Since the previous CNN poll had been taken, Bernie Sanders didn’t have a noteworthy gaffe, and Hillary Clinton didn’t leave a particularly positive impression either at an interview or at a town hall meeting. In fact, most of the news coverage has been on the Republicans because, thanks to our illustrious DNC Chair, the Democrats are receiving a fraction of the media attention due to a limited number of debates. That’s why I decided to delve into the details of the poll, the numbers behind the numbers, and compare the old poll released September 10th and this new one with Clinton’s allegedly increased lead.
Like any respected poll, CNN lays out its methodology to tell you who they interviewed, how many of each group (Democrats, Republicans, independents and so on) and the margins of error. Both polls are prefaced by this statement. Read this one carefully because it contains the key to understanding what CNN did here.
“Crosstabs on the following pages only include results for subgroups with enough unweighted cases to produce a sampling error of +/- 8.5 percentage points or less. Some subgroups represent too small a share of the national population to produce crosstabs with an acceptable sampling error. Interviews were conducted among these subgroups, but results for groups with a sampling error larger than +/-8.5 percentage points are not displayed and instead are denoted with “N/A”.
= new reply since forum marked as read
