AP's Sidoti spins latest Obama poll numbers really, really hard
November 11, 2009 8:49 am ET by Eric Boehlert
More problems with the dismal AP report on the latest Obama polling numbers. CF already highlighted the article's bizarre and condescending use of the phrase "novice commander in chief" to describe the president. But the piece is also riddle with other problems.
Question: How many paragraphs does it take the AP's Liz Sidoti to report what Obama's latest job approval rating actually is?
Answer: Nine paragraphs.
That's sort of all you need to know about Sidoti's report, which paints an almost comically bleak picture of the political landscape that Obama now faces. (It's like Jimmy Carter-meets-Herbert Hoover.) Why is the nine-paragraph delay telling? Because if Obama's poll numbers had actually gone done, than that information would have been included very high in the AP dispatch; likely in the second or third paragraph.
But because Obama's (healthy) poll approval rating remained unchanged Sidoti needed nine paragraphs to properly spin the polling data before conceding that, oh yeah, Obama still enjoys a robust job approval rating of 54 percent. (i.e. It's a job approval rating that his direct predecessor likely did not enjoy for his entire second term.)
Meanwhile, this AP passage seems monumentally misguided [emphasis added]:
Now, Obama's approval rating stands at 54 percent, roughly the same as in October but very different from what it was in January just before he took office, 74 percent.
Honestly, was there a political reporter in America who thought that Obama's sky-high job approval rating back in January was real? Didn't everyone pretty much concede that that rating was artificially high and reflected the country's exuberance with electing a new president? (It was like when president Bush's approval ratings soared into the high 80's immediately following 9/11.) So if that Inauguration Day number for Obama wasn't real, why would reporters like Sidoti now point to it as a benchmark for how far Obama has supposedly fallen?
I'm curious, did Sidoti ever write about Bush's approval rating when it hit bottom in the low 30's by contrasting that with his post-9/11 numbers? I certainly doubt it, because everyone knew those 2001 numbers were artificially high. But today you see reporters like Sidoti who all the time point to Obama's Inauguration Day numbers and pretend it's newsworthy that his approval rating isn't what it was in January.
Bottom line: For decades inside the Beltway press corps, the operating rule for assessing monthly approval ratings for the president was simple: Did the numbers go up or down from the previous month? And if they moved significantly than that might be considered news. But under Obama, that approach has been ditched in favor of Sidoti's AP style which is, have Obama's approval ratings gone down from eight months ago?
Like we said, Sidoti spins these numbers really, really hard.
Daily Presidential tracking Poll
The whole point was that this article was written with impending DOOM of Obama's approval ratings being in the basement, which it's not. It's still at the same level it was a month ago, and around the same level it's been at for several months, as in, a majority of people in the country still approve of how Obama is handling his job.
And she buried the most pertitent supporting info in here atricle NINE PARAGRAPHS down. Why? Because, as MMFA pointed out, it doesn't really support her argument if it's looked at though any reasonable perspective.
But yeah, you COULD cherry-pick polls... LIKE YOU JUST DID. But MMFA is not trying to argue that Obama is better than he is, or support him, or whatever. The problem here that they're poitning out is that the basic informration that Siddotti and the AP chose to report on, was misrepresented relative to how this information is traditionally reported, and relative to any reasonable person's expectations.
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Still think the AP is liberal?
MMFA didn't pick the poll. The AP did. And it's the way the poll was portrayed that didn't give the reader a fair and impartial view of that the polling data should be showing us.
Changing the way polls are evaluated that disadvantage Obama compared to the way polls have been looked at in the past is misinformation by the media that aids conservatives.
The article is spot on. Sindoti is spinnig the article (and poll numbers) to fit her opinion.
You think she's guilty of spin but your spin is worse for ignoring all the other poll numbers she wrote about on the economy, direction of the country, and Obama's handling of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, all of which Sidoti correctly noted are worse now than a month ago. Therefore, you are wrong to say Sidoti "ditched" the month-by-month poll analysis "approach" (which you based on one flawed poll comparison).
I think truly objective people here need to get rid of their biases and read Sidoti's article, look at ALL the polls she writes about, and then look at other respected poll numbers to get a clear picture of how Americans view Obama's presidency. You certainly won't find an objective view of Obama on liberal or conservative blogs. And right now, it's a mixed bag at best for Obama. There's no getting around it.
It took me to point out in this blog that Obama (whom I support) has worse numbers in many areas now than he did one month ago.
His only stable number, the 54% is the only number from the AP poll Eric/MMFA cared to mention here. For Eric to focus only on that number - and Sidoti's flawed comparison of it to an early Obama job approval poll - and ignore the others shows his bias toward Obama.
Eric's blog post here is not a neutral, balanced analysis of Obama and the AP poll and he needed to be called out for it.
Moreover, if you criticize reporters for having a bias, you shouldn't then engage in bias yourself. Eric looks like a hypocrite in that regard, at least in this instance (but is very good at what he does otherwise).
And as far as Liz Sidoti is concerned, she is guilty of anti-Obama bias with her "novice" commander-in-chief statement in her previous article, but no right-wing bias in the article Eric criticizes here.
My problem and Eric's problem with Sidoti should've only been that she buried the lede in this article. She took too long to set up the AP's monthly poll results. Post the numbers first and then explain the narrative. That's what she should've done.
You have brought nothing substantive to the table except an apparent liking of double standards for media criticism. It's not ok if the AP writes something biased or overly negative towards democrats because they're a news organization but it's perfectly ok for MMFA to have a bias and ignore facts that are negative towards democrats because this is a "blog"?
That's basically what you're saying. And it's a joke, hypocritical and so typical of partisans everywhere.
You have brought nothing substantive to the table except an apparent liking of double standards for media criticism. It's not ok if the AP writes something biased or overly negative towards democrats because they're a news organization but it's perfectly ok for MMFA to have a bias and ignore facts that are negative towards democrats because this is a "blog"?
That's basically what you're saying. And it's a joke, hypocritical and so typical of partisans everywhere.
You have brought nothing substantive to the table except an apparent liking of double standards for media criticism. It's not ok if the AP writes something biased or overly negative towards democrats because they're a news organization but it's perfectly ok for MMFA to have a bias and ignore facts that are negative towards democrats because this is a "blog"?
That's basically what you're saying. And it's a joke, hypocritical and so typical of partisans everywhere.
And that assumption of course is absurd. For any given subject, democratic screwups are dwarfed by republican screwups.
The Daily Kos points out that the first 8 paragraphs of the AP piece don't have a lot of relevance to the actual data from the poll...nor do they bother to site that data.
I'm not sure is for whatever reason motivated to spin Obama's ratings as worse than they really are, or whether they're just trying to get more news buzz and interest after having invested money in a poll that is, once the 3.1% margin of error is taken into account, just not that interesting... yes, the numbers are slightly lower, but it's not enough to be very interesting. Certainly not enough for a responsible journalistic lead-in that is so bleak in tone.
Maybe this is a case of image and branding taking primacy to (and thereafter influencing) the poll numbers, or at least their interpretation. John Tantillo has written that Obama is in serious branding trouble, and urgently needs to find the strength of Candidate Obama in President Obama.
Thomas Friedman has written a sympathetic piece about Obama in the NYT that pins the problem on the lack of a coherent narrative (basically a more literary take on Tantillo's branding idea).
Regardless...this AP write-up is a sad commentary on journalism.
Sidoti writes: "The latest Associated Press-GfK poll shows that Americans grew slightly more dispirited on a range of matters over the past month, continuing slippage that has occurred since Obama took office as the year began." She also writes that Americans are "increasingly pessimistic" about the country. So yes, the "euphoria" of 2008 is indeed over.
That is accurate and backed up by the actual polling data she writes up: 56% of people now say the U.S. is going in the wrong direction, compared to 51% in October and 49% in February; 46% approve Obama's handling of the economy, compared to 50% in October; 45% disapprove of the Iraq War now, when that number was 37% in October; 48% disapprove of his handling of Afghanistan, compared to 41% in October. Only his overall job approval rating is a truly positive number from month to month: 54%. Health care reform is still split at about 50%.
Sidoti's only flaws (minor as they are) were in not getting to the actual poll numbers right away and comparing Obama's latest job approval rating to pre-Inauguration data. But DailyKos has a point too: she probably could've left out the off-year elections as they indeed had no bearing on the AP's poll results. That's a minor flaw too.
But overall, fellow Obama supporters, deal with these AP poll numbers, the good and the bad, Sidoti's mostly spot-on analysis of them, and move on.
We'll get right on that, but not at a partisan media criticism site.
Here at this partisan media criticism site, we're going to criticize the media when it screws up in ways that benefit the other party. I hope it won't be too jarring an experience for you.