More on the Times’ fake legalization poll

It is a heady experience to see Charles Krauthammer defending the interests of America as a concrete country for once instead of promoting America as a global empire. I’m thankful for effective opposition to the Bush-Kennedy immigration bill from whatever quarter it may come.

Krauthammer analyzes last week’s top-of-the-front-page story in the New York Times that reported broad public support for the amnesty bill. I’ve already discussed that fraudulent article, but Krauthammer went deeper and found the key poll question that it referenced:

I looked for the poll question that justified the pro-legalization claim. It was Question 61. Just as I suspected, it was perfectly tendentious. It gave the respondent two options: (1) allow illegal immigrants to apply for legalization (itself a misleading characterization because the current bill grants instant legal status to all non-criminals), or (b) deport them.

Unsurprisingly, faced with the false choice between deportation and a “chance” for illegals to apply for legalization, 62 percent chose legalization, and the Times reported this as broad support for the measures in the Bush-Kennedy bill.

This is pure lying. Indeed it’s a kind of super-lying, since the Times is not only falsely reporting a fact, it produced that false fact by means of the poll question which it commissioned, and then reported that false fact as truth. It is vertical integration in the production and distribution of lies.

There is only one way to prevent the U.S. media from engaging in such Stalinist-level propaganda. There needs to be a law saying that any news story reporting the results of an opinion poll must include the wording of the questions that are the basis for the news story. Short of such a law, readers should deluge newspapers with complaints every time they report on a poll without printing the actual poll questions.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 03, 2007 05:54 PM | Send