Fox News cherry picks a poll and gets it quite wrong

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson gave a news brief saying that a USA Today / Suffolk University poll taken between February 20 and 24, 2018 reveals that on the list of priority concerns to Americans, the matter of Russia, particularly the matter of any election “interference” or “collusion” with the campaign now-president Donald Trump, is about as low as it can be. The reference that Mr. Carson used is show in this question, taken from the poll itself:

We showed the marginal (summarized) data here to simplify to show our readers where this data came from. However, Mr. Carlson left out major and important points in his report.

The poll reporting IS true as far as the matter of the question asked is concerned, that being “Thinking about your vote for U.S. Congress this November, what’s the most important issue that will affect your vote?” In that regard the issue of election meddling is a very low priority item, ranking less than 1%.

However, Mr. Carlson did not report on the rest of the poll. As the reader can see, this is question 7. There were forty questions in total on this poll, and the aggregation of answers reveals a response set that shows that the media narrative has at least stirred people up on this question.

We give a few examples here:

And this:

It would have been good for Mr. Carlson to report further on this. While the American public does not appear to care much about the meddling issue, it appears from this poll, that most of the people who responded believe the media narrative and echo it back. “The Russians” has become something like a meaningless euphemism all across the media plane, and so, is anything, there is at least a tacit acceptance that “the Russians” are doing something to the USA. What that is, no one has been able to really say.

This issue is interesting and potentially more serious than one might think because the public thought has been largely “brainwashed” by this insistent drumbeat of a line that is irrational at its core. All a person has to do to reveal a problem is to simply stop and think critically about this statement:

“The Russians meddled with the election.”

It does not take a mental giant to realize that this statement is meaningless. In one’s own personal context, when it comes to politics, it seems that most people have their minds made up about their political views, and precious little happens that changes that view. The truth is this: nothing has happened that is unusual, coercive or different than has ever happened in the American political sphere. The reality of politics is that everyone tries to convince everyone else to either adhere to or change their point of view. That is the name of this game. Those forces have been international in scope for as long as there have been nations.

However, news media has an obligation to report news, not create narratives to control thought. The effectiveness of “the Russians” narrative is obvious from the poll results shown here, and if one wants to see even more clearly how media bias plays a role, read the rest of the poll results, given in a link here.

Joseph Goebbels would be proud of the mainstream American media right now. We ought to be thinking critically for ourselves.