Fake news cannot always be classified as stories that are created from nothing. Quite often, there are facts from which the story is generated. More often, those same facts have been manipulated to create the story the journalist or media organization wanted to tell. In the case of coverage of an early December Reuters\/Ipsos poll, the kneejerk headline was \u201cSupport for Impeachment Increasing.\u201d The more telling story behind the headline is Reuters\u2019s own methodology, however.<\/span><\/p>\n According to Reuters, \u201cThe result, combined with Reuters\/Ipsos polling over the past several weeks, showed that the number of Americans who want to impeach the president increasingly outnumbers those who do not.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n In the competitive 24-hour news cycle, there is a tendency to push headlines to air. With ratings and billions of dollars of advertising revenues on the line, there is little time to read entire reports. When a new poll is released, no one is reading the explanation of method. Push the headline. That\u2019s what the pollsters want (Gallup, Zogby, Reuters, et al<\/em>. all get their names on the air, thus legitimizing them) and that\u2019s what the news outlets want. In this case, what was lost was the fine print at the bottom of the report explaining the politically disproportionate pool of responders.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe Reuters\/Ipsos poll was conducted online, in English, throughout the United States,\u201d the report explained. \u201cIt gathered responses from 1,118 adults, including 528 Democrats, 394 Republicans and 111 independents. It has a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of 3 percentage points.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n A quick summation of the math tells us that Reuters polled more Democrats than Republicans and Independents combined. A further explanation showed that the results are very much even, with nearly eight out of 10 Democrats supporting impeachment, while eight out of 10 Republicans oppose it. A few other recent polls have shown that support for impeachment has slightly decreased. It appears that Reuters was used as a corrector to an idea that cannot be allowed in the mainstream media\u2014that impeachment is not wildly popular.<\/span><\/p>\n There is some reason to believe Reuters was a witting partner in this attempt to sway popular opinion. In 2016, Reuters was one of the news and polling organizations oversampling Democrats to show that Hillary Clinton had a considerable lead over Donald Trump. Reuters had oversampled Democrats 44% to 33%, which doesn\u2019t sound like a large number. Yet, consider that in presidential polling, anything above 3% is considered outside the margin of error. Therefore, an oversampling of 11% is significant.<\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s something wrong with polling, as the election of 2016 clearly showed. Some pollsters explained the severe errors (lack of accuracy) in 2016 polls by explaining that they didn\u2019t weight the polls enough based upon the level of education of respondents. What the elitist pollsters are saying is that they hadn\u2019t counted on all the uneducated people coming out to vote for Trump. It\u2019s a typical take from a group of pollsters who surround themselves with the D.C. Beltway to protect them from the ills of the \u201cflyover states.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n In a rare moment of clarity, CNBC and Wired<\/em> magazine proposed that there are two other reasons the 2016 polling was so inaccurate compared to the final results.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cOne theory is that a large majority of undecided voters decided to vote for Trump at the last minute,\u201d wrote Jake Novak at \u201cCNBC.com.\u201d \u201cAnother is that Trump was and is supported by disaffected Americans who are very unlikely to respond to pollsters at all.\u201d Novak calls these explanations \u201chard to fix or even prove.\u201d Republics can often be tricky like that. Sometimes, voters do not vote for the media\u2019s chosen candidate, which always leaves pundits and analysts with their hands raised and palms up, screaming \u201cHow?\u201d Those they feel are \u201cuneducated\u201d could easily explain it to them in a way that even the MSM would understand. When you\u2019re deemed a \u201cdeplorable\u201d who \u201cclings to their God and guns,\u201d the average American typically does not support those candidates, their ideologies, or their pollsters.<\/span><\/p>\n Reuters will continue to join the other mega-pollsters and news organizations pushing the narrative that Trump is increasingly unpopular and losing his grip on whatever power he had within the party and country. They\u2019ll have the numbers to prove it, no matter how they have to manipulate the method to \u201cprove\u201d their position. They cannot possibly fathom that any other narrative could be true.<\/span><\/p>\n S.T. Patrick holds degrees in both journalism and social studies education. He spent 10 years as an educator and now hosts the \u201cMidnight Writer News Show.\u201d His email is STPatrickAFP@gmail.com. He is also an occasional contributor to TBR history magazine and the current managing editor of <\/strong>Deep Truth Journal<\/strong><\/em> (DTJ), a new conspiracy-focused publication available from the <\/strong>AFP Online Store<\/strong><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n