The Pelosi polling lie, please make it stop

It's become the blind-leading-the blind at this point, as the The Drudge Report and the Boston Globe have joined with Politico to completely butcher the results from a recent CNN poll. They have completely manufactured the claim that Pelosi's approval ratings have plunged from 51 percent in January of this year, to 39 percent today, with the suggestion that it's all the fault of the CIA briefing scandal.

From the Globe:

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released this afternoon found that the approval of how Pelosi is doing her job as speaker has dropped from 51 percent in January to 46 percent in March to 39 percent now.

From Politico:

The CIA torture briefings story line is taking its toll on Nancy Pelosi's approval ratings. A CNN poll just released shows her approval rating has dropped from 51 percent in mid-January to 39 percent in a poll taken late last week as the CIA controversy was unfolding. Forty-eight percent of those polled "disapprove" of how Pelosi is handling her job as speaker.

And the Drudge headline:

Pelosi's approval rating plummets....

It's simply not true. 

First of all, if Pelosi's job approval ratings had fallen from 51 to 39 percent in four months I'm pretty sure CNN would have mentioned that in its write-up. It did not. Instead, what the CNN/Opinion Research poll found, according to CNN's own report, was that in January the approval rating of Congressional Democrats as a whole stood at 51 percent, not Pelosi's personal approval ratings.

Note that according to the CNN/Opinion Research data posted at PollingReport.com, Pelosi's "favorable" rating in a January survey this year was 39 percent. (CNN/Opinion Research did not ask about her "job approval" in January.)

Meaning, based on CNN/Opinion Research polling data, which both Politico and the Globe and Drudge point to, there's simply no evidence that Pelosi's job approval has budged at all this year, let alone plummeted.