Editor's note: over the past few years I've done literally everything in my power not to duplicate content across multiple websites but I've finally reached the point where social media censorship is forcing my hand. The following informal article analysis essay originally appeared on Facebook, but since that company is currently (and obviously) throttling how many views my account gets until I give them money - I'm forced to re-post it here:
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The vast majority of the time I post a focused article analysis piece on Facebook it's because I'm looking to highlight glaringly obvious mistakes in the mainstream media's coverage. Today I thought I'd switch gears and take a look at this delightful piece of low budget independent journalism by Ashok Koyi on his website which appears to be called "the Kalinga" - Koyi drills deeper into a recent Iowa 2020 Democratic Party primary poll that got a lot of mainstream media play and discovers that not all is what it seems.
You can find the article here:
With the important note that Ashok's article appears to be the result of multiple Twitter sleuths (two of which he credits at the bottom of the piece) I'd like to start by noting that I agree with almost everything the author states in this piece. Furthermore the investigative methodology is sound and the conclusion Koyi draws from his investigation of the people behind this poll is completely inarguable - namely that this isn't so much a "poll" as a mainstream liberal Frankenstein memo designed to manufacture the narrative that Iowa is going for Biden or Warren and Sanders is doomed.
In particular I encourage readers to please note the following paragraph taken from Koyi's report:
"The most important aspect being
"Binder specializes in qualitative rather than quantitative research. His focus is on assessing subjective factors such as language, emotion, and attitudes."
To me, all this word salad means only one thing. It means he mind-reads potential voters when conducting his polling. In simple terms the polls capture his feelings of voter’s feelings about politicians
I have never heard a worse way to describe a pollster than this. Given that only the memo is published without the underlying dataset, I am assuming that this poll is based on the feelings of David Binder staff about which democratic candidate gets what percentage of votes in Iowa in the upcoming democratic primary election"
This analysis is dead-bang on and although the author is generous enough to allow for the possibility that this isn't a mockery of traditional polling, I am not so kind - the poll in question is clearly paid for propaganda designed to discourage Sanders supporters and hopefully keep them from voting for Bernie in the primary.
This of course brings up the larger issue of the rise in paid polling outfits that operate like public relations and marketing firms over roughly the past decade. As anyone familiar with the Koch-backed climate change denial industry can attest, it is now possible for literally anyone at all to hire a polling company to produce a poll that manufactures whatever specific narrative you like. Typically this will be accomplished with some combination of leading or ambiguous questions or carefully targeting polling by a region's average annual income - who can forget the CNN poll upon which Biden's case as an "unassailable front-runner" was built up in the media, including in particular and to the surprise of no one, CNN! What was only mentioned on Right Wing News sites however is the fact that the polling company somehow managed not to sample a "statistically significant" number of 18-49 year olds who probably wouldn't have been all that jazzed about Biden.
The simple truth is that "he who pays the piper, calls the tune" and while political campaigns demand accuracy from their internal polling contractors, they are not above hiring what amounts to PR firms like Focus on Rural America and the company of its founder, Link Strategies, to manufacture a specific narrative in the media. These results are then fed to influential figures in the public discourse and you've essentially created the idea that Bernie is finished and Warren is ascendant out of nothing. Now traditionally, the mainstream media has been considered a safeguard against spurious polling because they not only sponsor a number of polls that are in theory designed to be accurate, but they also publish the methodology behind those polls when they release him. What happens however when the mainstream corporate media itself is now controlled by politically active billionaire titans of industry like say, Jeff Bezos? What happens when massive American corporate media companies are the ones paying the piper, and the tune they want to hear is that Bernie loses? Well, in this case what clearly happened is a B.S. poll designed to suppress pro-Sanders turnout in Iowa got treated seriously in the mainstream media for a few days; whether or not it actually stops Iowans from voting Sanders in five months is less clear - but that is certainly the intent of the exercise.
Look, this is big business and these folks will go to any length to rig even meaningless internet polls - good examples include Trump fixer Michael Cohen hiring an IT firm to try and rig a GOP nomination contest Drudge Poll or the weirdo Pelosi fanboys over at Daily Kos rigging weekly forum polls against Sanders by banning almost every Bernie supporter during the 2016 election. Obviously there is a certain amount of value in using rigged polls to suggest a political narrative and clearly it's fairly effective.
Who watches the watchmen when the watchmen have all been bought?
Go back and read Koyi's report at the top of this article again and ask yourself how many people are going to bother to take the roughly ten steps it takes Ashok to figure out this "poll" is utter nonsense, before they decide to believe it or not?
Right, the answer is "almost nobody."
As I've written numerous times since the real Democratic Party 2020 nomination fight kicked off just before Christmas in 2018, the mainstream corporate media, the Democratic Party and rich liberal elites are prepared to do anything, say anything and push any narrative to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the Dem nomination - precisely *because* they know that he will beat Trump.
Since that time, the Manhattan Island media and Beltway Think Tank glitterati have rotated through a seemingly never ending cast of "Bernie Slayer" ascendant candidates who had supposedly already rendered Sanders and his revolution irrelevant. One by one Lock Em Up Kamala, Trapper Keeper, Skateboard Jesus and Dollar Store Macron have fallen by the wayside only moments after the establishment media told you they were in the driver's seat. Now Palooka Joe Biden is in the act of falling on his sword and a newly conciliatory Liz Warren is hanging out with Wall Street executives and Hillary Clinton - you'd have to be a complete idiot not to see what's going on here at this point.
The narrative that the Bernie Sanders political revolution is already dead will never die, so long as the Bernie Sanders political revolution continues to live - the fact that they're still paying media minions and fake pollster gurus to tell you Sanders doesn't stand a chance is all the evidence you need to demonstrate he's still in the race and the fight is not over.
As always in life, it's important to "consider the source" and the source of all this anti-Bernie mainstream media coverage are companies owned by rich people who'd rather lose to a fascist like Trump, than share with the labor class under a Democratic Socialist like Sanders.
- Nina Illingworth
