Kesher Talk

The "Impressions of America" poll: Zogby's poll of foreign attitudes to America (here is the press release) looks at least as awful as the Gallup poll of the Islamic world. And by that I mean both the methods and the results.

"The poll was conducted in March and early April with face-to-face interviews of 500-700 randomly selected adults in five Arab nations - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, and in three non-Arab, Muslim nations - Pakistan, Iran and Indonesia. Finally, to establish a proper context for the final results, face-to-face interviews also were conducted of randomly selected adults in both France and Venezuela."

Zogby found that while people in these countries love to take in our mass culture, they also love to hate us and our policies. "At a time when the United States is building a broad coalition against terrorism, this poll shows that U.S. policy in the Middle East provides a significant stumbling block."

Forgive me, but BULL*#@! ...

Like the Gallup "poll of the Islamic world," actual results are only available to people willing to fork over hundreds of dollars. Media lapped it up without ever seeing any of the guts of the poll, as best I can tell.

The same caveats also apply to this poll as to the Gallup one, though Zogby does not make them: the results do not represent "the world" or even "Arab" or "Muslim" nations. They also cannot represent actual opinion. Free countries are the only places where opinion surveys can ever yield real data - Arab and Muslim dictatorships are not a place of free inquiry.

On top of all that, pollster John Zogby is notorious in the polling community for being, well, a shyster. He keeps his methods an absolute secrecy, contrary to the stipulations of the major polling organizations.

In the April/May issue of the American Enterprise, Zogby responds to criticisms of his polling methods (which I prodded TAE to ask him in the interview). Zogby replied that, while polling is a hard science, it is also an art. He points to his track record, which is how he has built his reputation - not on credible methods but on sort-of predicting some electoral results that other pollsters got wrong.

On Friday morning, The Christian Science Monitor hosted a breakfast with John Zogby (the pollster) and James Zogby (president of the Arab American Institute). Low and behold, the Zogby poll is described as being run by BOTH of them, not just by the pollster, and the discussion of it on TV has involved both of them - John talking about the poll itself, then a quick tag to James who rails against U.S. foreign policy.

posted by Howard @ 4/15/2002 04:37:57 PM