by Edwin Sibley

Created on: October 09, 2008

Polls; Tools of Propaganda

Polls, polls, polls. Their existence flourishes during the elections. They are also prominent during times of crisis. The pollsters would have you believe that the results they publish are a consensus of opinion for the majority of Americans.

I was at a PTA Meeting years ago, and their was a key issue that the school leadership said they needed parental opinion on. So they told the audience to write out their opinion and drop it in a box. That way, their opinion would remain anonymous. And so that is what happened.

At the next meeting, the issue resurfaced, and the audience was given the "consensus" of opinion supposedly based on the individual comments submitted at the previous get together.

Now, you may be asking yourself, what on earth does this have to do with polls. Just this. There was no way of certifying that the consensus given by the educators was actually the consensus of the audience. They were totally free to enact the opinion of their own choosing, all the while claiming it was the consensus of the audience. Consensus is much more attractive to those who wish to empower their own opinion, because they can claim support for their ideas without appearing dictorial. They force their own agenda upon the masses and blame it on the masses. It was the "consensus".

Polls work exactly the same way. News media love it because they use the polls that line up with their agenda as empowerment for the propaganda they would have you believe. After all, there would be no polling businesses without media to publish their supposed results.

Case in point. If you recall, during the last presidential election, before any primaries, Howard Dean was the darling of the press and media. Why? Because Mr. Dean supported opinions that lined up with the propaganda agenda of the media. They were intoxicated by their own delusion that they could successfully manipulate the opinion of the American Voter and make their candidate of choice, the choice of the majority of voters. NOT!

Howard Dean bombed badly from the very first ballots and fell quickly into obscurity. The press had to scramble for another poll supported candidate. And so on it goes. Today, it's politics as usual. Everyone it seems, politician and media alike, attempt to sway public opinion with the use of poll results rather than election results.

So that takes us back to the top. Who authenticates the polls published in print and reported on radio and TV? NOBODY! The media simply chooses the

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