Skip to main content

MSM specialty: Spinning the polls until they get the results they want


They just can't help themselves. And that's why their influence shrivels more and more each passing year.

The mainstream media---in this case the hapless Winnipeg Free Press and the CBC ---are so anxious to see Sam Katz defeated as mayor, and their own bias on taxes adopted as policy, that they're madly spinning the latest poll results to create a version of the truth that satisfies their fantasies.

That in itself is bizarre since the poll, conducted on their behalf by Leger Marketing, is already so slanted it wouldn't pass a first year statistics class.

The poll finds that Sam Katz is the voters' preferred candidate to be mayor by 6 percentage points, 38 to 32 for his chief opponent Judy Wasylycia-Leis.

And yet the Winnipeg Free Press reported the results this way:

"Mayor Sam Katz has a six-point lead on Judy Wasylycia-Leis as Winnipeg's mayoral race enters the home stretch, but a more committed core of support for the challenger suggests election night may be a nail-biter."

CBC had its own spin:

"Winnipeg's two leading mayoral candidates are heading for a photo finish in the Oct. 27 election race."

Neither mainstream news outlet mentioned that a previous poll, by Probe Research three weeks ago, found JustJudy (as she wants to be called) had 50 percent of the professed vote. In short, she's lost more than a third of her support in 3 weeks of campaigning.

Nor did they include the fact that her support now (32 percent) is lower than the combined support for Katz's two main opponents in the 2006 election (35.7 percent).

The FP and CBC are quick to say JustJudy's supporters are more committed than Katz's, and so are more likely to actually go to the polling station and cast their ballots in the event of a hurricane or blizzard that might deter others.

They ignore the corollary of that argument -- -that the six percent of polled voters who refused to give their preference for mayor are more likely to support Sam Katz, because if they were the committed Wasylycia-Leis supporters they would proudly declare so instead of being cagey.

And that would boost Katz's support to 44 percent, or just about unchanged from the Probe Research poll.

At the time, the Free Press was using JustJudy's support at 50 percent in the Probe poll as proof that the electorate embraced her promise to raise property taxes every year of her term.

Probe president Scott MacKay said, "She made her position clear: Vote for me and I'll raise taxes...As counterintui­tive as that sounds, it's very possible that has resonated with the electorate."

Or, maybe not. You would think a six point decline in support might be seen as a repudiation of her tax pledge. No sirree, Bob. The MSM had Leger Maketing carefully "prove" the opposite.

Leger asked the voter for their views on taxes. Or, rather, they asked carefully slanted questions to get the public to agree to the Free Press/CBC view on taxes.

The question

"Thinking about property taxes in Winnipeg, which of the following statements best reflects your opinion?

The result

Property taxes should increase based on inflation in order to maintain public services at current level: 56 per cent

Property taxes should be frozen at current levels even if it means cutting back on spending for some services in the city: 38 per cent

Don't know/refuse to answer: Six per cent

-- Source: Leger Marketing poll of 800 Winnipeg adults in October 2010

Note how Leger stacks the questions, putting the positive terms (based on inflation, maintain public services) in the answer they want to get, and the negative terms (frozen, cutting back) on the answer they don't want.
This sort of slanted polling on behalf of the Free Press and CBC underlines the bias in reporting we have to put up with.

Leger deliberately did not ask whether voters supported Katz's tax plan. How about....
Winnipeg has two-thirds of Manitoba's population but only receives 7 percent of all the taxes collected in province to fund its operations. Is that fair?

If the province only dedicated one percent of PST to Winnipeg, we would have $130 million more to provide services to citizens. Should Manitoba give Winnipeg 1 percent of PST?

But then that wouldn't guarantee the answers the Free Press and CBC wanted, namely:

Winnipeg property tax hike favoured (CBC, Wednesday, October 20, 2010)
The MSM isn't above twisting the facts to support the bias, either.

"Wasylycia-Leis said the increase would cost homeowners $27 a year on average on a home assessed by the city at $90,000." (CBC, Oct. 20, 2010)

" Saying it's time to show leadership and be honest about the city's finances, Judy Wasylycia-Leis is promising a two per cent property tax hike every year of her administration. That's an extra $27 a year on a $200,000 home." (Wasylycia-Leis promises 2% yearly tax hikes, By: Mary Agnes Welch, 17/09/2010)

What they carefully don't say is that the promised tax increase is cumulative. They hope readers fixate on the figure $27 a year and think," that's not so much."

They don't explain that the increase is $27 only the first year, then $55.05 the second year, and so on until its $110 the fourth year. And that's not counting any possible increase in mill rates.

Nor have they explored the alleged support for a hike in property taxes "based on inflation". That's not what Judy Wasylycia-Leis promised, so where does that option come from?

In 2009 the inflation rate was 0.28 percent. So a 2 percent tax increase would have been SEVEN TIMES inflation for that year.

And its running well below 2 percent this year so far.

It looks like linking tax increases to the rate of inflation was yet another concoction of the Free Press and CBC to spin the story their way.

They can't help themselves
.

Popular posts from this blog

The unreported bombshell conspiracy evidence in the Trudeau/SNC-Lavelin scandal

Wow. No, double-wow. A game-changing bombshell lies buried in the supplementary evidence provided to the House of Commons Judiciary Committee by former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould. It has gone virtually unreported since she submitted the material almost a week ago. As far as we can find, only one journalist-- Andrew Coyne, columnist for the National Post--- has even mentioned it and even then he badly missed what it meant, burying it in paragraph 10 of a 14 paragraph story. The gist of the greatest political scandal in modern Canadian history is well-known by now. It's bigger than Adscam, the revelation 15 years ago that prominent members of the Liberal Party of Canada and the party itself funneled tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks into their own pockets from federal spending in Quebec sponsoring ads promoting Canadian unity. That was just venal politicians and a crooked political party helping themselves to public money. The Trudeau-Snc-Lavalin scandal is

Crips and Bloodz true cultural anchors of Winnipeg's aboriginal gangs

(Bebo tribute page to Aaron Nabess on the right, his handgun-toting friend on the left) At least six murder victims in Winnipeg in the past year are linked to a network of thuglife, gangster rap-styled, mainly aboriginal street gangs calling themselves Crips and Bloods after the major black gangs of L.A. The Black Rod has been monitoring these gangs for several months ever since discovering memorial tributes to victim Josh Prince on numerous pages on Bebo.com, a social networking website like Myspace and Facebook. Josh Prince , a student of Kildonan East Collegiate, was stabbed to death the night of May 26 allegedly while breaking up a fight. His family said at the time he had once been associated with an unidentified gang, but had since broken away. But the devotion to Prince on sites like Watt Street Bloodz and Kingk Notorious Bloodz (King-K-BLOODZ4Life) shows that at the time of his death he was still accepted as one of their own. Our searches of Bebo have turned up another five ga

Manitoba Hydro is on its deathbed. There, we said it.

Manitoba Hydro is on its deathbed. Oh, you won't find anyone official to say it. Yet . Like relatives trying to appear cheery and optimistic around a loved one that's been diagnosed with terminal cancer, the people in power are in the first stage of grief -- denial. The prognosis for Hydro was delivered three weeks ago at hearings before the Public Utilities Board where the utility was seeking punishingly higher rates for customers in Manitoba. It took us this long to read through the hundred-plus pages of transcript, to decipher the coded language of the witnesses, to interpret what they were getting at, and, finally, to understand the terrible conclusion.  We couldn't believe it, just as, we're sure, you can't--- so we did it all again, to get a second opinion, so to speak.  Hydro conceded to the PUB that it undertook a massive expansion program--- involving three (it was once four) new dams and two new major powerlines (one in the United States)---whi

Nahanni Fontaine, the NDP's Christian-bashing, cop-smearing, other star candidate

As the vultures of the press circle over the wounded Liberal Party of Manitoba, one NDP star candidate must be laughing up her sleeve at how her extremist past has escaped the scrutiny of reporters and pundits. Parachuted into a safe NDP seat in Winnipeg's North End, she nonetheless feared a bruising campaign against a well-heeled Liberal opponent.  Ha ha.  Instead, the sleepy newspeeps have turned a blind eye to her years of vitriolic attacks on Christianity, white people, and police. * She's spent years  bashing Christianity  as the root cause of all the problems of native people in Canada. * She's called for  a boycott of white businesses . * And with her  Marxist research partner, she's  smeared city police as intransigent racists . Step up Nahanni Fontaine, running for election in St. John's riding as successor to the retiring Gord Macintosh. While her male counterpart in the NDP's galaxy of stars, Wab Kinew, has responded to the controversy over

Exposing the CBC/WFP double-team smear of a hero cop

Published since 2006 on territory ceded, released, surrendered and yielded up in 1871 to Her Majesty the Queen and successors forever. Exposing the CBC/FP double-team smear of a hero cop Some of the shoddiest journalism in recent times appeared this long August weekend when the CBC and Winnipeg Free Press doubled teamed on a blatant smear of a veteran city police officer. In the latest example of narrative journalism these media outlets spun stories with total disregard for facts that contradicted the central message of the reports which, simplified, is: police are bad and the system is covering up. Let's start with the story on the taxpayer funded CBC by Sarah Petz that can be summed up in the lead. "A February incident where an off-duty Winnipeg officer allegedly knocked a suspect unconscious wasn't reported to the province's police watchdog, and one criminologist says it shows how flawed oversight of law enforcement can be." There you have it. A policeman, not

Winnipeg needs a new police chief - ASAP

When did the magic die? A week ago the Winnipeg police department delivered the bad news---crime in the city is out of control. The picture painted by the numbers (for 2018) was appalling. Robberies up ten percent in  a single year.  (And that was the good news.) Property crimes were up almost 20 percent.  Total crime was 33 percent higher than the five year average. The measure of violent crime in Winnipeg had soared to a rating of 161.  Only four years earlier it stood at 116. That's a 38 percent deterioration in safety. How did it happen? How, when in 2015 the police and Winnipeg's police board announced they had discovered the magic solution to crime? "Smart Policing" they called it.    A team of crime analysts would pore through data to spot crime hot-spots and as soon as they identified a trend (car thefts, muggings, liquor store robberies) they could call in police resources to descend on the problem and nip it. The police