Author John Ziegler commissioned Zogby International to poll Obama voters after he interviewed scores of them after the election for an upcoming documentary he is producing about the 2008 presidetial election. He noticed in his interviews that many of the Obama voters he spoke with left him with the idea that they had formed their decision to vote for Obama based on the media coverage of the campaign. After the poll was conducted Ziegler concluded that the poll reveals a "stunning level of malpractice on the part of the media in not educating the Obama portion of the voting populace."
The poll was conducted by the non-partisan John Zogby who has built a reputation for accuracy in recent elections. The poll was a 12-question, multiple-choice survey was conducted Nov. 13-15, 2008 of 512 Obama voters nationwide with a margin of error of +/- 4.4%.
- Only 2% of those surveyed got a perfect score or 11 out of 12.
- Only 54% of Obama voters were able to answer at least half or more of the questions correctly.
- 94% of Obama voters correctly identified Palin as the candidate with a pregnant teenage daughter.
- 86% correctly identified Palin as the candidate associated with a $150,000 wardrobe purchased by her political party.
- 81% chose McCain as the candidate who was unable to identify the number of houses he owned.
- When asked which candidate said they could "see Russia from their house," 87% chose Palin, although the quote actually is attributed to Saturday Night Live's Tina Fey during her portrayal of Palin during the campaign. An answer of "none" or "Palin" was counted as a correct answer on the test, given that the statement was associated with a characterization of Palin.
Obama voters did not fare nearly as well overall when asked to answer questions about statements or stories associated with Obama or Biden:
- 83% failed to correctly answer that Obama had won his first election by getting all of his opponents removed from the ballot.
- 88% did not correctly associate Obama with his statement that his energy policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry.
- 56% were also not able to correctly answer that Obama started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground.
- 72% of Obama voters did not correctly identify Biden as the candidate who had to quit a previous campaign for President because he was found to have plagiarized a speech.
- 47% did not know that Biden was the one who predicted Obama would be tested by a generated international crisis during his first six months as President.
In addition to questions regarding statements and scandals associated with the campaigns, the 12-question, multiple-choice survey also included a question asking which political party controlled both houses of Congress leading up to the election -- 57% of Obama voters were unable to correctly answer that Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate.
The full article can be found at
http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.cfm?ID=1642
Pretty revealing about what many of us already know: the media is biased. They have been proving this for a long time, but this election manifested a level of a lack of objectivity that has never been seen before in American journalistic history.
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