Who are you going to believe, a lie detector or an opinion poll? That’s the question Scott Whitlock sets up in an Oct. 12 NewsBusters post on an interview of Anita Hill, who testified against Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court nomination in 1991.
First, Whitlock complained that interviewer Andrea Mitchell didn’t “challenge the honesty of Hill.”Then, after noting that Mitchell pointed out that Hill “took a lie-detector test, a polygraph exam, privately administered from a former FBI official and that was not paid any attention to. There were other corroborating witnesses who were not permitted to testify,” Whitlock responded: “Also, an October 14, 1991 USA Today poll found that 47 percent of Americans believed Thomas. Only 24 percent found Hill to be telling the truth.”
Whitlock doesn’t explain why he wants us to trust what an opinion poll once said about Hill’s allegation over the results of a lie detector test. Still, it’s part of the Media Research Center’s revisionism on Hill, led by Tim Graham repeatedly — and baselessly — insisting that Hill is a liar.