by Propaganda
affirmatively by roughly 52 per cent). Since the respondent was told to indicate the
statement that “best represents your opinion,” it becomes apparent that an obvious
source of the seeming inconsistency lies with the degree of aversion to the contrasting
statements and that the affirmative claims do not necessarily represent a view with
which the respondents fully agree. The import of an answer to a survey question can-
not be fully appreciated without seeing the question in context. To see how mislead-
ing this form of survey could become, consider the following extreme: “Which best
represents your opinion? ‘The tooth fairy exists’ or ‘Democratic Party rule will be best
for the United States.’” People may have aversions to the Democratic Party, but if the
only alternative is belief in the tooth fairy, most people would find they had to accept
the second alternative, joking aside. It should not be difficult to construct question
pairs where the “push” is subtler and not so obviously manipulative.
Pollster Louis Harris helped improve the perception of President Richard Nixon’s
standing in public opinion in the early 1970s. Instead of asking whether Nixon should
be impeached, Harris’s question was whether respondents wanted Nixon “impeached
and removed from office.” As Michael Wheeler comments, “Impeachment and
removal, of course, are two quite different things. In essence, Harris was asking not
whether Nixon should simply be tried, but whether he should be tried and hanged!”49
Clearly, fewer people would give an affirmative answer to “impeached and removed
from office” than they would to “impeached” alone.
An important rule, emphasized by Wheeler, for interpreting the significance of
poll results, is “to read the questions to see if you yourself would be comfortable giving
agree/disagree answers. If you would not, then you must discount the results of the
pol , no matter how conclusive the statistics seem.”50
Polls have become part of the weaponry of policy justification, so it is not surpris-
ing that, where politically contested ground is involved, appeals are made to different
pollsters with their sometimes divergent results. For example, in October 1997, an
Angus Reid poll said that the majority of Canadians wanted the government to cut
both taxes and the national debt. However, a poll taken about the same time by Ekos
said that three-quarters of Canadians were deeply concerned about the growing gap
between rich and poor and wanted the government to start spending again on social
programs. As critics pointed out at the time, the discrepancy comes in part from the
superficiality of the context in which questions are presented. Everyone wants more
benefits and wants to pay less to get them, so that serious policy can hardly be formu-
lated on the basis of slapdash responses saying one thing or the other. Frank Graves,
president of Ekos, was quoted in the same story as saying, “Some polls are being used
as part of a commando operation for one ideological point of view.”51
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Another important rule is to note carefully who is paying for a pol . Canadian public opinion polls about the Kyoto Protocol in 2002 seem to show very different results
when measured by the Liberal Party and the Government of Alberta, an oil producing
province. When the latter poll was publicized, the Globe and Mail headlined on the top of its front page in very large type “Support for Kyoto plunges” (November 2, 2002).
In fact, the story produced no evidence of a shift of opinion. It was simply reporting on
the results of two different polls, the first of which asked Canadians to choose between
supporting or opposing ratification. In this pol , conducted by Ekos for the Liberals, 79
per cent supported ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. The second pol , conducted by
Ipsos-Reid for the Alberta government, asked a very different question, namely, whether
respondents supported the Kyoto Protocol or a “made-in-Canada” approach, referring to
a plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by a smaller amount over a longer period.
As long as the specifications and implications of the second option are not spelled out,
the patriotic sounding second alternative could sway respondents, who might still, if
given the alternative between ratifying or not ratifying Kyoto, choose the former.
Everyone can wish for a slightly improved plan, but political choices rarely give
everyone exactly what they want. Sometimes the real choice is simply of this kind: do
you support (Kyoto, or whatever) or don’t you? It is a clever public relations technique
to present idealized alternatives to the public and then use responses to these alterna-
tives to sway opinion regarding the real alternatives. A spokesman for the Ipsos-Reid
poll was reported as saying there was no doubt that support for Kyoto was falling.
That could well be true as a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting from the widespread
attention to the second poll results and the Globe and Mail’s reporting of the two
polls. But it hardly establishes that there had been a change in thinking about whether
to ratify or not, given these as the only choices.
5. Lying Respondents. Wheeler notes that a Harris memorandum prepared for inter-
viewers stated, “It’s been brought to our attention that almost all of our surveys are
showing the population to be more educated than what the census says it actually
is ... we feel respondents are exaggerating the amount of schooling they’ve had.”52
Obviously, if respondents lie, polls cannot be all that reliable.
6. Dishonesty in Gathering the Information. Some pol -taking involves simply filling in with pencil marks a few pages of coded blank spaces. Pol -takers are also often paid by
the number of questionnaires filled out. It is easy to cheat by filling in sheets without
doing interviews, although checkups might make this a risky process. Still, checkups
are not all that strong a guarantee of integrity in practice. Michael Wheeler gives an
example:
In 1968 the New York Times commissioned Gal up to do an intensive survey of atti-
tudes of Harlem residents. The information was collected, tabulated, and submitted
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to the Times for publication. An editor was so pleased with the poll that he decided to play it up by sending a reporter and a photographer to get a story about some of
those who had supposedly been interviewed. At seven of the twenty-three addresses
Gallup had given them, the newsmen could not even find a dwelling! Moreover,
five other people who had allegedly been polled could not be traced—the addresses
existed but apparently the people did not. Not even all the remaining interviews were
legitimate. In one case the Times reporter learned that the interviewer had talked to four people playing cards and incorporated all their answers into one interview.53
7. Biased or Incompetent Interpretation of Responses. There are many ways in which
failure to take account of polling theory and of limitations built into any sampling
procedure can lead to misinformed conclusions based on polls. There may be a deliber-
but from wishful thinking or sheer ignorance.
Katimavik, a youth group in Canada, received public funding under the Liberal
Trudeau government, but had its funds cut off after the Mulroney Progressive
Conservatives came to power in 1984. One of the reasons the group got bad press was
their supposed use of illegal drugs. However, as a letter-writer to the Ottawa Citizen
pointed out, the interpretation of a poll concerning drug use was very biased:
One of the questions we had to answer was: “Are you aware of anyone having taken
drugs during the period as participants in the program?” It is from answers to this
question that the report concluded that “55 per cent reported taking drugs.”
The real conclusion of this question, assuming the result is reliable, should have
been “Fifty-five per cent of the participants are aware of the fact that at least one per-
son has taken drugs.” When our group responded to this question, we all answered
Yes as there was, in fact, a participant who did take drugs. He was kicked out in the
third week of the program.54
Sometimes a newspaper favouring a certain policy position will give prominence
to a poll supporting that position, ignoring both methodological weaknesses of that
poll and other polls supporting a contrary view. The Globe and Mail, for example,
gave front-page coverage to a poll commissioned by the Canadian Abortion Rights
Action League (CARAL). The story sought to interpret the results of the poll by
interviewing Norma Scarborough, president of CARAL, the very group that commis-
sioned it. It would have been fairer to get opinions from pol ing experts or from those
not sharing Scarborough’s preconceptions to supplement her views. When I wrote
to the same newspaper to complain that it appeared to have ignored a 1983 Gallup
poll indicating that 72 per cent of Canadians are against abortion on demand, I was
not contradicted.55
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Wheeler also reveals the large part that discretion can play in tabulating answers to questions. Suppose the question asks whether there is an energy shortage immediately
or looming in the future, and the respondent replies, “Well, I think the gas crisis was
manufactured by the companies.” When the answer is tabulated in the “no energy short-
age” category, it may be misleading, because recognition that an immediate gas crisis is
manufactured is not the same as saying that there are no longer term energy shortages.56
8. Fluctuation of Opinion. It is a common observation that public opinion can be
greatly affected by events that have a vivid effect on the public imagination. A par-
ticularly gruesome child murder turned public attitudes against the sex industry
flourishing on Yonge Street in Toronto in the 1970s. News items, editorial opinion,
letters, and columns can have a powerful effect as well.57 Pollsters themselves empha-
size that they are giving only a “snapshot” of opinion at a given time. Politicians who
rely on favourable polls as a basis for cal ing an election may find out that voters’ opin-
ions change, particularly if they feel that the election was called earlier than necessary
merely in order to ride a tide of favourable opinion. This resentment can be aroused,
fed, and exploited by opposition parties, as former Ontario Premier David Peterson
found when he lost the election he called in 1990.58
9. Deliberate Attempts to Manipulate Polls. Since opinion has been shown to be
affected by prominent events, the idea of manufacturing such events has occurred
to power-holders and power-seekers. Michael Wheeler describes Charles Colson’s
successful efforts to improve President Richard Nixon’s standings in the polls, one of
which included giving a prominent pollster a lucrative contract, whereupon negative
polls gave way to positive ones from that pollster.
One direct tactic involved rigging a special newspaper poll on the Vietnam War
by buying up thousands of papers and flooding the editors with questionnaires filled
out in favour of Nixon’s policies. Wheeler also reports that during the 1968 campaign,
Nixon had a source within the Gallup organization who provided advance word on
when the surveys were going to be taken. “This allowed Nixon to time his activities so
that they would have the maximum impact on Gal up’s polls.”59
10. Bogus (Unscientific) Polls. It is possible to produce all manner of unscientific polls, sometimes for amusement. For example, “hamburger polls” judge the popularity of a
politician, political issue, or some other topic by the number of different kinds of ham-
burgers purchased. A hamburger will be given a name of one politician, for example,
while other hamburgers will be named for rivals. They may be essentially the same
hamburgers with different names. The names under which hamburgers are ordered
constitutes a “vote” for the politician, and the votes are tabulated to produce a mea-
sure of the popularity of the different rivals. Unscientific polls can also be carried out
and publicized with a serious intent to influence public opinion.
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Conrad Black describes his own publication of a makeshift poll prior to the
October 1973 Quebec election. His paper, L’Avenir de Sept-Iles, supported the Liberal Party against the PQ. As Black wrote in his autobiography, A Life in Progress:
Our reporting was fairly balanced for most of the campaign, but we did an editorial
sandbag on the PQ, complete with publication of a poll indicating a Liberal victory.
There was no indication of the number of people sampled so the fact that I consulted
only seven people (including myself ) never came to light.60
Statistics
Since 1954, Darrell Huff ’s How to Lie with Statistics 61 has provided guidance to some of the basic forms of deception through the use of statistics. His book, recently
reissued, is still useful for spotting such techniques today. What follows is a selection
of his observations; his hypothetical examples are supplemented with a few real-life
examples. Huff identifies four ways in which statistics can be used deceptively.
1. The Well-Chosen Average. When we use the word “average,” we can mean different
things. Perhaps the most common meaning is specifically referred to as the “mean,”
defined in the following way. Suppose we are thinking of “average” income for workers
in a plant. We divide the total amount of salaries by the total amount of workers, giv-
ing us the figure for what one “average” worker makes—the “mean” salary. In practice,
of course, things are not that simple. Do you include part-time workers and workers
on disability pay, sick leave, etc.? There are many ways of fiddling figures.
Huff ’s point is that there are two other thoughts to keep in mind about the
notion of “average.” One is the idea of “median,” defined as the midpoint in a range of
things we are considering. In the case of workers’ salaries, we would ask: what is the
salary of that worker who stands at the midpoint when workers are ranged by
salaries
from highest to lowest? There is also the notion of “mode,” which in this case refers
to the income level at which more income earners are grouped than any other level.
Suppose we draw boxes to represent workers earning up to $10,000, between $10,000
and $20,000, between $20,000 and $30,000, and so on. The box or category in which
the greatest number of workers appears would be the “mode.”
Where there is so-called normal distribution, the mean, median, and mode fall in
the same place on a graph. It so happens that the height of human beings follows “nor-
mal” distribution, meaning that we have the greatest number of people in the middle
of a bell-shaped curve that tapers off gradually at two ends of the graph representing
the tall and the short. But not every curve is bell-shaped, and it may well happen that
representation of “average” will vary significantly according to whether we present the
mean, the median, or the mode. Suppose one person in a company earns $50,000,000
a year through salary and stock benefits, while the other 99 workers get $50,505.05
each. The “average” salary could then be represented as $55 million (rounded) divided
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by 100, or $550,000. That would conceal the fact that all but one earned a little over $50,000. A false picture is given by using the mean, whereas the median gives a more
representative “average.” If a corporation is talking to shareholders, the median figure
might be the one to emphasize, while in labour negotiations management would pre-
fer the mean figure to show how well-off workers are. Of course, the figures chosen
here make it obvious how deception might occur, and no one would likely be fooled.
However, with more complex sets of figures, a similar bias might not be so easily
detectable.
When mainstream media accept as news official interpretations of figures without
critically assessing their truth, the public may be influenced without the media actually
endorsing the official claims. So when the Bush administration claimed in 2001 that
proposed tax cuts would benefit 92 mil ion Americans, letting them keep an average