“As reports claim that Russia’s new daily five-hour truce has failed to allow medical evacuations in Syria, a poll by state-run VTSiOM found that almost 75% of those surveyed believe the Russian military’s Syria operation has achieved its goals.” (RA’s Daily Russia News Blast, 28 February 2018)
It seems Robert Amsterdam’s amanuensis Citizen M has not read my latest salvo against the Russian pollocracy.
What is the point of surveying people who either know nothing about the “Russian military’s Syria operation” or have been deliberately and woefully misinformed about said operation whether they think it has “achieved its goals”?
Finally, if you know a poll like this is horribly, irreparably skewed by abject igorance and a severe case of state-induced delusion, why quote its results as if they were newsworthy?
Except for the occasional municipal district council election, whose elected members have almost no power and even less money to exercise their almost total lack of power, all elections in Russia are rigged from top to bottom and beginning to end to ensure the “right” candidates are elected. Since this is the case, why do our media show an almost childish trust in the reliability of Russian “public opinion” polls? It never occurs to all our overeducated, usually incredibly cynical journalists that Russian “public opinion” polls might be just as faulty and fixed as Russian “elections”?
Good journalistic practice should exclude generating false impressions about an entire country and its people by citing demonstrably unreliable polls. TRR
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