Over the past two days, Senator Feingold's effort to censure Bush has been an extremely hot news item. In fact,
according to Google News, it is the second most written about story in the country over the past two days. It has been covered by every major newspaper, every cable news network, and basically by every news organization in the country. Now, given all of this, Mystery Pollster appropriately asks whether any news organizations will poll on censure, and what questions they should ask when they do so.
He writes:
So after more than six months of organized campaigns to get pollsters to ask questions about impeachment, we may now need to consider how pollsters will ask a question that, as far as I can tell, no one has yet asked about President Bush: Should he be "censured" by Congress?
As summarized
here back in January, a number of liberal websites have been conducting organized email campaigns to get pollsters to ask questions about the potential "impeachment" of President Bush. In response to the email deluge, two prominent media pollsters explained why they have not asked any such questions and what conditions might motivate them to do so:
Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport (8/30/2005): "The general procedure Gallup uses to determine what to ask about in our surveys is to measure the issues and concerns that are being discussed in the public domain. We will certainly ask Americans about their views on impeaching George W. Bush if, and when, there is some discussion of that possibility by congressional leaders, and/or if commentators begin discussing it in the news media. That has not happened to date." [Article available to subscribers only, but also quoted
here].
Washington Post Polling Editor Richard Morin (12/19/2005): "We do not ask about impeachment because it is not a serious option or a topic of considered discussion--witness the fact that no member of congressional Democratic leadership or any of the serious Democratic presidential candidates in '08 are calling for Bush's impeachment. When it is or they are, we will ask about it in our polls."
Whatever the debate on impeachment may be, there can be no question that censure has now reached both of these standards:
Gallup's threshold, that there needs to be "some discussion of that possibility by congressional leaders, and/or if commentators begin discussing it in the news media" has clearly been reached. Feingold's resolution was widely discussed by nearly every commentator in the national news media, and clearly there was discussion of the possibility be congressional leaders over the last two days as well. There is absolutely no way that Gallup's threshold to poll on impeachment has now not been reached by censure.
Morin's (regularly changing) threshold, that members of the congressional Democratic leadership or serious '08 candidates need to call for impeachment before they will poll on it, has also clearly been reached. Almost every single article on Feingold's resolution mentioned that Feingold might run for President in 2008. In fact, the major Republican talking point against the resolution was that Feingold was only doing it to improve his chances in 2008. Thus, both Republicans and Democrats agree that Morin's threshold for conducting a poll has been reached.
With everyone talking about Feingold's resolution, with every previously described standard for conducting a poll now being met, and with many articles that only quote Joe Lieberman arguing that few Democrats support Feingold's resolution, I would argue that it is now the responsibility of new organizations to commission polls on censure. If they do not explore public opinion on this topic through any means other than anecdotes and internet polls, they will be complicit with the now pervasive production of reality via anecdote. That is not what any news source would describe as its mission. If, on the other hand, news organizations want to actually produce accurate reports on objective reality, then they must conduct a scientifically valid telephone survey on censuring Bush over warrant-less NSA wiretapping. After two days when this story was top news in almost every major American news outlet, for major news organizations to not survey public opinion on the matter would be to abandon their responsibility as journalists and reporters.
For any organization looking to conduct such a poll,
Mystery Pollster has produced questions on censure that were asked about President Clinton. All of those questions seem fine by me.
