Most adults know the difference between a simple website poll that lets visitors to that site vote for whatever the question posed is, and another type of online poll that actually tries to gauge public opinion, and gets more involved with the background of the person answering their poll (demographics, age, location, sex, race, etc) so that it can be considered scientific when the results are tabulated, rather than just a mass of meaningless data.
Perhaps I'm being mean to Hannity thinking he's just too stupid to know the difference, when in fact he does and is just doing what he always does, being the happy propagandist he is for disseminating and promoting complete bullshit as fact.
Whatever the case, Fox News told him to stop it.
Source: Business Insider
A Fox News executive sent a memo Tuesday afternoon reminding television producers and the politics team that unscientific online polls "do not meet our editorial standards."
Dana Blanton, the vice president of public-opinion research at Fox News, explained in the memo obtained by Business Insider that "online 'polls' like the one on Drudge, Time, etc. where people can opt-in or self-select … are really just for fun."
"As most of the publications themselves clearly state, the sample obviously can't be representative of the electorate because they only reflect the views of those Internet users who have chosen to participate," Blanton wrote.
As the Fox News executive pointed out, users who participate in such polls must have internet access, be online at the time of the poll, be fans of the website in question, and self-select to participate.
"Another problem — we know some campaigns/groups of supporters encourage people to vote in online polls and flood the results," she wrote. "These quickie click items do not meet our editorial standards."
At least three Fox News hosts cited unscientific online polls in the hours after Monday night's presidential debate to suggest Donald Trump emerged as the winner of the political showdown.
Trump had come out ahead in a slew of unscientific polls, or polls in which the sample of participants did not accurately reflect the sample of viewers who watched the debate. Such polls are almost always discounted by professional pollsters and analysts.
The only scientific survey conducted in the debate's immediate aftermath was the CNN/ORC instant poll, which showed that viewers thought Hillary Clinton handily defeated Trump. Respondents to a Morning Consult poll released Wednesday also said, 49% to 26%, that Clinton bested Trump in the debate.
"News networks and other organizations go to great effort and rigor to conduct scientific polls — for good reason," Blanton wrote in the memo. "They know quick vote items posted on the web are nonsense, not true measures of public opinion."
