Announcing that Fox News slants to the right is about as revelatory as reporting that fish are wet. Still, the latest pairing of stories on the channel’s website is particularly rich: Fox buries its own poll, which gives President Obama a four-point lead over Mitt Romney, in favor of the most recent poll by the New York Times — that evil liberal behemoth! — that conveniently shows the Republican challenger ahead.
The article summarizing the Fox poll ignores its key horse-race findings and instead opts for a Romney-friendly headline: “37 percent of voters say they are better off than four years ago.” Only in the tenth paragraph — and only after we’re told that “by a 12 percentage-point margin, more voters say the Obama administration has made the economy worse rather than better” and “a 62-percent majority says they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country” — does the article inform us that Obama leads Romney 45-41.
By itself, Fox’s selective reading of its poll results is not a surprise. After all, the “Trending in Politics” feed that runs down one side of the web page features such crucial and reality-based news as Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s latest proclamation that the president’s birth certificate is “definitely fraudulent.” But the downplaying of the proprietary Fox poll, when paired with the site’s lead article, is particularly amusing. What piece of news does the site lead with? “Poll Shows Romney Edging Past Obama Nationally.” And who conducted that poll? CBS News, erstwhile home of Dan Rather (best known on Fox for the faked documents he cited when reporting on George W. Bush’s military record), and the New York Times. Like Newt Gingrich, who rails against the “liberal media” but referred authoritatively to a NYT article when it supported his Romney-bashing agenda during a debate, Fox reports on mainstream polls only when the results are convenient:
Despite the glut of tough ads against him, Mitt Romney has edged past President Obama in a new national poll that reflects dimming views about the state of the economy.
The New York Times/CBS News poll released Thursday shows Romney with a 45-43 percent lead. That’s within the poll’s margin of error but marks the first time Romney has held any lead in the survey since becoming the presumptive Republican nominee.
Ironically, conservative outlets regularly slam the Times’ polls for giving an advantage to Democrats by undersampling Republicans. The Times interviews registered voters, while conservative pollsters like Rasmussen and news organizations like Fox regularly sample only likely voters — criteria which may more accurately reflect election-day turnout but which also ensures the universe leans older, whiter and more Republican. That the Times poll nevertheless gives Romney the lead, while the Fox poll advantages Obama, is probably due more to statistical noise and the inevitable ups and downs of approval ratings than anything else. Pollsters of every political stripe caution that reading too much into a single survey, or even a handful of surveys, is dangerous.
But hey, don’t step on the message. Obama is losing. That’s the truth in the right-wing reality, and Fox is sticking to it.
. . . So Well Read. . . 