A May 26 CNSNews.com article by Penny Starr uncritically repeated results of a poll bought by Americans United for Life claming that, in Starr’s words, “Americans care about what kind of Supreme Court justice that President Barack Obama will nominate, including how they would rule in cases involving abortion.” Starr noted that the poll was conducted by The Polling Company without further explaining that, as we’ve detailed, the firm’s owner, Kellyanne Conway, is a partisan Republican activist.
The poll itself provides further clues to its efforts to skew questions in order to get the answers that AUL wanted. For instance, it references “partial-birth abortion,” even though it’s a political term coined by anti-abortion activists.
Starr’s article was later updated to add the AUL’s statement on Sonia Sotomayor, newly nominated to the Surpeme Court. AUL unsurprisingly attacks Sotomayor as “an avowed judicial activist” without providing evidence to back up the claim.
Starr makes no apparent effort to obtain any response to the claims in the article — the only people she quotes are the head of AUL and Kellyanne Conway.