One of the components of the Media Research Center’s election-fraud conspiracy theory was a poll it conducted claiming that some people who not have voted for Joe Biden if they knew about the Hunter Biden controversy — but it has censored the fact that the company that did the poll, McLaughlin & Associates, worked for Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, putting the poll’s objectivity into question and raising questions of conflicts of interest (not to mention McLaughlin’s notorious unreliability). But that’s the kind of bias the MRC prefers, so it sent some more money McLaughlin’s way, as detailed in an anonymously written April 26 item:
As Joe Biden nears his 100th day in office, a new poll conducted for the Media Research Center by McLaughlin & Associates finds a plurality of voters say the news media have given the President an easier ride than his predecessors.
The public’s perception of a pro-Biden bias is confirmed by a recent MRC study which found broadcast evening news coverage of the new President has been more positive than negative (59% positive vs. 41% negative). By contrast, our analysis of the same time period in 2017 found 89% negative coverage of President Trump, vs. just 11% positive.
The poll of 1,000 people who voted in last fall’s general election was conducted from April 8 to April 12. When asked if they thought the news media has been easier or harder on Joe Biden, or if Biden has been treated about the same as other Presidents, voters by a more than three-to-one margin saw the media as going easy on Biden.
Nearly half (45.3%) said the media had been “easier on Joe Biden,” compared to just 13.8% who said the media had been “harder on Joe Biden.” Just over a third (34.7%) said they thought the media had treated Biden about the same as other Presidents, while 6.2% said they didn’t know.
Again, the MRC hid from readers McLaughlin’s partisan record and dubious reliability. On the other hand, McLaughlin did produce the result the MRC paid it for, so appears that narrative once again trumps facts.
That makes for great campaign oppo research. But legitimate “media research”? Not so much.
Speaking of biased polls, an April 27 item by Joseph Vazquez touted:
A newly released poll revealed that Americans aren’t putting up with big business unleashing faux outrage at states attempting to protect their electoral processes.
Rasmussen Reports released a survey of 1,000 American adults showing that 37 percent of Americans were less likely to purchase Coca-Cola products. Rasmussen said that the results were due to the company’s liberal political stance against Georgia’s recent law protecting voter integrity. In addition, the survey found that Americans opposed major businesses attempting to influence politics “[b]y more than a 3-to-1 margin.” Perhaps Coca-Cola and others should learn that leftist virtue-signaling doesn’t necessarily pay dividends.
Vazquez isn’t going to tell you that Rasmussen has a notorious conservative skew, or that what he and Rasmussen call “voter integrity” — the preferred right-wing terminology for Republican-pushed election law changes — most people would call voter suppression.