http://www.democracycellproject.net/blog/archives/2005/12/tell_us_richard.htmlTell Us Richard, Was It Politics?
The Washington Post's polling editor Richard Morin recently sounded off during a chat about why the Post had never asked a question about impeaching Bush. Morin offered lame excuses, and attacked those who were writing to him asking him to include an impeachment question. (See Impeachpac for the transcript.)
Why won't the Post ask the Big I question? One minute of research was sufficient to destroy Morin's two claims. I came up with two others. In the end, it's hard not to conclude that Morin's refusal is based entirely on politics. What do you think?
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Richard,
I read a transcript of your explanation for why you get angry about being asked to ask a question about impeachment on the Post's polls. Your explanation sounds like you are shooting the messenger without paying any attention to the message.
There are four possible explanations for your refusal to poll on impeachment: the two you offered in this discussion, and two that I will suggest.
Let's take your first explanation: In the interview, you claim that you are not asking about impeachment because impeachment "is not a serious option or a topic of considered discussion."
Well before this week, there were plenty of people outside of DC who were talking about whether the President had committed impeachable offenses. All you had to do was spend 5 minutes exploring the political discussion areas of the Internet and you would have seen that impeachment was a common topic. A Google search on the phrase "impeach Bush" turns up 1,660,000 hits at 9:43 this morning. And even if you wanted to turn your back on the "rabble" who haunt the Internet, a search of Lexis-Nexis, "News: Most recent publications (English 90 Days), turns up more than 400 hits in the mainstream media indexed by Nexis--before the NSA scandal hit the press.
And one other pollster had already asked about impeachment, with rather startling results. Let's read what your fellow Post reporter Dan Froomkin had to say in your paper on September 21, 2005 about a Zogby poll taken earlier:
"More than four in 10 Americans, according to a recent Zogby poll, say that if President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment.
"But you wouldn't know it from following the news. Only three mainstream outlets that I can find made even cursory mention of the poll last week when it came out."
The startling results of the Zogby poll, and the discussion of those results in your own paper, are another demonstration that impeachment was not an invisible issue.
In light of these search results, your first argument collapses: there was plenty of discussion going on, and other traditional news outlets were writing and talking about it. It strains credulity to believe that the Post was unaware of these discussions.
Your second explanation was "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." But if history teaches us anything, it is that our Congresspeople are always the last to know and the last to act. Using statements from Congresspeople as a metric for deciding when something is worthy of polling is a sad commentary on how the Post views the American people, and why people complain to pollsters about how out of touch the mainstream media appear to be with their kitchen-table conversations.
As a third explanation, we might consider laziness or stupidity; could it be possible that no one at the Post was aware of the impeachment discussions going on across the country, or if they were aware, failed to communicate that information to the paper's chief pollster? I reject this explanation because it is an insult to all of the hard-working researchers and reporters at the Post.
We are left with a fourth explanation, that the decision was a political one. Someone at the Post, and I hope that it was not you personally, decided that impeachment was too hot, too threatening to the Post's relationship with the Bush administration. Given the vindictiveness of this administration, it is easy to understand how Post executives would hesitate to produce valid polling numbers that showed the American people having any interest at all in impeaching the president.
The direct evidence, and the circumstantial evidence, point strongly to this political explanation. And after all, it would not be the first time that a paper's management chose to avoid confronting the Bush administration: just look at the miserable decision by the New York Times to sit on the news of Bush's illegal spying campaign, a decision that could easily have turned the outcome of the 2004 presidential election. (Note Froomkin's comment above about how the Zogby poll basically sank without a trace.)
So how about cutting the lame excuses, getting some guts, and start asking the damn question?
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