Fox News polling director Leonid Brezhnev (on left), with deputy Richard Nixon
The excellent Steve Benen has long done the work of angels—very wry, amused angels—in exposing the polls of Rupert Murdoch's pretend journalistic organ, Fox News. The problem for Fox is that they ask all kinds of questions where, at least part of the time, they're going to get answers they don't like, such as Barack Obama's approval rating, which,
as Benen notes, just hit
his highest mark in seven months.
So to make themselves feel better, the Foxholes shade a few questions their way. And when I say shade, I mean, "slant in a ridiculously biased way that would even make Lee Atwater laugh." Benen picked out this absolute gem from Fox's latest survey:
"In the aftermath of the Benghazi terrorist attacks, the Obama administration incorrectly claimed it was a spontaneous assault in response to an online video, even though the administration had intelligence reports that the attacks were connected to terrorist groups tied to al Qaeda. Do you think the Obama administration knowingly lied about the attacks to help the president during the ongoing re-election campaign, or not?"
Or as Benen puts it:
"The administration totally lied. Do you think the administration knowingly lied?"
The amazing thing, though, is that despite priming respondents with Soviet-level propaganda techniques, only 51 percent said that yes, they agree, the lying Obama administration totally lied. It's not hard to imagine what the response would be if you asked a question like this straight. But of course, it's hard to imagine Fox playing anything straight. And even when they try to skew reality in their favor, they don't seem to have a lot of luck.
P.S. Benen has an awesome collection of other absurd Fox poll questions gathered over the years. My favorite might be this one from 2007: "Do you think the Democratic Party should allow a grassroots organization like Moveon.org to take it over or should it resist this type of takeover?" If only!