CNN Spins Poll Following Obama Speech Favoring Pro-Abortion Health Care Bill
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
September 10, 2009
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — CNN has earned itself significant criticism following a poll it conducted after President Barack Obama’s speech touting the pro-abortion health care bills. CNN manipulated the number of Republicans and Democrats in the poll to make it appear the speech went over well with the American public.
"Two out of three Americans who watched President Barack Obama’s health care reform speech Wednesday night favor his health care plans — a 14-point gain among speech-watchers," CNN trumpeted today.
"Sixty-seven percent of people questioned in the survey say the support Obama’s health care reform proposals that the president outlined in his address," the news services claimed.
However, at the bottom of its news story on its own survey, CNN admits to polling more than twice as many Democrats as Republicans.
"The sample of speech-watchers in this poll was 45 percent Democratic and 18 percent Republican," it says.
Although CNN gave Democrats a 23 percent edge in the partisan breakdown for the polling, it admitted "the sample is about 8-10 points more Democratic than the population as a whole" — which would likely bring down the numbers to just over half saying they favored the pro-abortion health care bill after Obama’s speech.
Matthew Balan, an analyst for the Media Research Center, noticed the skewed results.
"The pollsters interviewed 427 Americans before and after their speech- only 18% were Republicans, while 45% were Democrats," he explained. "Due to this skewing, CNN didn’t really play up the poll’s results on air, but they tried to do that on their CNN.com website."
"CNN’s senior political correspondent Candy Crowley detailed the poll’s results on Anderson Cooper 360 less than an hour after the President delivered his speech on Wednesday evening, and the following morning on the American Morning program," he said.
Crowley appeared to realize the bias wouldn’t go over well with viewers and heavily disclaimered her remarks.
“I think we have to just understand that these are not- you know, that polls go up and down, particularly flash polls. This is an interesting look. Obviously, Democrats loved what they saw tonight," she said. "I think that is good news for him, even given that it’s just among Democrats."
CNN.com’s home page touted how the poll “finds big swing after Obama speech."
MRC President and NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell released the following statement regarding the CNN poll:
"CNN has no business airing a ‘poll’ that is straight partisan reaction from those already in the can for ObamaCare," he said.
"Caveat or no caveat, CNN was dead wrong to run this and on national television proclaim, ‘We have important numbers here.’ It is an embarrassment that their news directors deemed it newsworthy to begin with. This network simply cannot be trusted to cover this hugely important story fairly," he said.
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