Propaganda: Opinion Polls

Polls are becoming an important weapon in a propaganda war. That's because you can use polls to tell everyone where they stand in relation to the average. The fact is, that most people want to be average. They do not want to be a fringe radical group. So if you tell them that the average person thinks torture is good, then they want to think the same. Even if they are horrified by the knowledge, they may gradually come to accept it if they think most people are on that side.

Here is a poll that was conducted recently about attitudes toward torture, and I will break it down for you to show how it can be tweaked to give different results, and how it is dependent on current news items for its actual meaning.

Question wording: "Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?"

The word "torture" is ambiguous - but in the context of the news today, this is probably interpreted as waterboarding. And then most people are not aware that waterboarding can cover a range of activities that go all the way from horseplay in the swimming pool to a horrible death. So the response is coloured by exactly what the respondent understands by the word torture.

What exactly is a "suspected terrorist". An Arab? A man or a woman? Would it be possible to suspect a white US Army veteran of being a terrorist - like Timothy McVeigh? Say we changed the wording of the pool from "suspected terrorist" to "known terrorist", does that change the response? And who exactly is it that suspects this is a terrorist - an anonymous source? "Suspected terrorist" is the second most emotionally loaded phrase in this survey after "torture".

Given the media hype, I think the phrase "important information", would mean, to the average respondent, "what is the location of a hydrogen bomb set to go off in two hours in the middle of Atlanta". But it could also mean anything on down to a question like "Have you ever listened to Al Jazeera?". But let's just say it is the bomb for now. Does the torturer know for sure there is a bomb, or is he (or she of course) just fishing for info? Sure the information would be important if you got it. But how do you know when to stop if the person says "There is no bomb" or "I don't know anything about the bomb". So how many times do you continue the torture until you believe what the person is saying?

Essentially, the entire poll question is so vague as to be useless, and not surprisingly given the media bias over the last few weeks, people are going to be split on the question. An emotionally worded poll like this does nothing other than justify torture by "proving" that many people are in favour of it.

Have you ever responded to one of these polls yourself over the phone? I have and I often ask for a clarification. You will never, ever, get a clarification because that would invalidate the poll. I understand why this is so, but then pollsters shouldn't ask such vague questions. And more importantly, people should not answer them.