John Ziegler very diplomatically defends Zogby "push-poll" (fivethirtyeight.com)

[nickgutierrez]

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/interview-with-john-ziegler-on-zogby.html

Very diplomatic, like a hole in the head is very painless. Here are the first four questions:

Nate Silver : Were only Obama supporters interviewed for the survey, or was everyone interviewed?
John Ziegler : The reason why I interviewed Obama supporters only is because I’m doing a documentary on the media coverage of the campaign and how the media coverage of the campaign impacted what Obama supporters knew or thought they knew about the campaign. I had planned from day one because I knew that no one would take seriously any random sampling of interviewees that I was going to commission a scientific poll of these questions. I also knew that it would be a lot cheaper for me to do a nationwide survey of Obama voters than the nation as a whole because basically I’d only have to do half the number of people to get a representative sample. When I went on FOX last night, I made a deal that if anyone on the left -- you're more than willing to take me up on this -- wants to ask the exact same deal of the McCain supporters and you get examples that are equal to or worse than the Obama supporters, then I’ll pay for your expense. The point here was not to show that Obama supporters were idiots -- there are plenty of idiots on both sides of the aisle -- but what information they got from the media that they were able to consume.

NS: Do you stand by all the statements in the survey as being unambiguously true?
JZ: I stand one hundred percent by the notion that there is absolutely zero ambiguity as to what the right answer is to any of the questions. With the one exception of the Palin-Russia-Alaska question which we asked the way we did for a very specific purpose which was to try and gauge the Tina Fey Effect which I think we did in a very effective manner which was what was actually said by Tina Fey, everyone attributed to Sarah Plain. But for purposes of scoring Obama supporters’ answers we counted Palin as a correct response.

NS: What was the right answer to that question?
JZ: The technically accurate question is that none of the four people said that, but we counted it as correct if they said Sarah Palin.

NS: Why would you commission a survey question with no correct response?
JZ: The purpose of the question, you pinhead, was we wanted to determine the Tina Fey Effect.

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Wow. That's the tame part - Ziegler actually pulls a Cheney at the end of the interview.