Propaganda Outlet OANN Yanks Pro-Trump Poll For Being TOO STUPID, EVEN FOR THEM

We got a live one here!

Y'all ready for Friday Fuckery Funtimes? The wankers at OANN are here to serve you and all the MAGA brethren with their promised poll showing Donald Trump whooping Joe Biden's ass.

Except OOOPSIE, shortly after the story about the promised polling "in favor of @realDonaldTrump" aired, the story was abruptly yanked from YouTube for being ... rather less "in favor" than promised. 

Writer Arieh Kovler was watching the video while it was taken down and managed to film a cached version from his browser.

@OANN I managed to play the segment from my cache. Here it is: https://t.co/cjHcuIF1TX

— Arieh Kovler (@Arieh Kovler) 1591910896.0 

Notice how the presenter sounds like a guy from Sputnik moonlighting at a pro-Trump media outlet dedicated to injecting slanderous propaganda into the American bloodstream? That's because OANN reporter Kristian Brunovich Rouz also writes for the Kremlin-backed Sputnik news service. And if that name sounds familiar, it's because he's the one who told Trump on Monday, via OANN of course, that 75-year-old peace activist Martin Gugino was an antifa supersoldier trying to jam police scanners. Heckuva coincidence, huh?

Apparently, OANN commissioned Gravis, a real pollster, to survey Floridians about the presidential race. According to OANN, Trump and Biden are tied at 50-50. Or as Rouz put it in his broadcast, "According to a new poll by OANN and Gravis Marketing, at least 50 percent of Floridians would vote to reelect their president if the election were held this week!" Which is technically correct. It would also be technically correct to substitute "Vice President Biden" for "their president" because MATH.

But you don't see a lot of 50-50 polls, right? Because most surveys allow for the fact that some portion of voters haven't made up their minds yet. Like so ...

Image via FiveThirtyEight  

And here's where the fuckery comes in. As Kovler points out, the "50 percent" number comes from "Question 2 and Question 3 combined." But those scamps never quite say what Question 2 was because they didn't want to show their work. Although the stellar graphics team appears to have failed to adjust the bar graph when they did ... whatever it is they did to those numbers.

 Presumably Question 2 was "Who would you vote for today: Trump, Biden, or undecided." Question 3 is where they forced the leaners, making them say who they'd vote for if the election where held today and they HAD to choose. Rouz framed this as "fifty-three percent of undecided voters would support President Trump if they had to make a choice today."

Leave aside the fact that you don't know what percentage of respondents were "leaners." Looks like the standard is about 11 percent, judging by FiveThirtyEight's list of recent polls, but you don't really need that information to spot the slippage here. If the poll of just the leaners has Trump six points ahead, and the combination of that number and the number of committed voters puts Trump at 50 percent, then he MUST HAVE been below 50 percent in Question 2.

Still confused? Okay, this is an imperfect analogy, but think about it like this. If the average of two numbers is 50, and one of the numbers is 53, then the other number has to be less than 50 . Right? So Biden had to be ahead with committed voters in Question 2, and OANN fudged it for the broadcast.

And when they realized how obvious it was, they took the whole broadcast down. Or perhaps, as Philip Bump noted in the Washington Post , they pulled the video because the picture it painted wasn't all that flattering for Trump in several respects. While Rouz flogged his network's poll as "a stark contrast to mainstream media surveys which claim to give a solid lead to Joe Biden," in fact it showed Trump favored on the economy by just five percent, which is hardly a crushing margin and is anyway in line with every other survey. In fact, the entire broadcast was propagandistic hyperventilation.

The question here was "Who is more responsible for the riots across the country?" Which is suggestive enough on its own, and yet still more than a third of Floridians blamed the cops. But in Rouz's framing it became, "Forty-three percent blame far left protestors for the latest violence and looting." See the difference?

Guess the copy they ran over this screenshot showing the age of poll respondents.

Did you guess "Overall the OAN poll appears to refute the latest suppression polling by the mainstream media and reveals the majority of Floridians are far closer aligned with President Trump than the Democrat cabal would like them to be"? No? WEIRD.

While most of OANN's spilled seed lands in the fertile soil of the wingnutosphere, this broadcast was bound to attract widespread attention after the network's chief executive Robert Herring flogged the report as an antidote to the CNN poll that caused Trump to lose his shit on Monday. Everyone in DC was waiting for this thing to drop, and when it landed like a Russian-inflected turd in the punch bowl, the geniuses at OANN raced to fish it out and flush it away before anyone noticed. But the internet never forgets! So those OANN wankers got shit all over themselves, as usual, and once again the president took a one day story, the CNN outlier poll showing Biden 14 points ahead, and dragged it out over five stupid days.

SLOW FUCKING CLAP.

[ WaPo ]

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