AIM on Facebook | Twitter From Accuracy in Media ‘s Allie Duzett: This morning, an AP-GfK poll on taxes made the rounds. CBSNews.com , MSNBC.com , and ABCNews.com were just a few of the many who picked up the original AP story . The original AP story was entitled, “AP-GfK Poll: Are your taxes fair? Most say yes.” CBSNews.com titled the story “Most Americans say the taxes they pay are fair.” At Politico the headline of a related story was “Polls: Most believe taxes are fair.” One site, News10.net , simply asked the question: “Are your taxes fair?” Each “mainstream” media outlet seemed to pick up on the fact that according to the poll, more Americans believe their taxes to be “fair.” However, very few seemed to make a big deal of the following facts: 1.       The margin of error on the poll was 4.2 percentage points. That means that while the poll concluded that 54% of Americans found their taxes to be fair, and 46% found their taxes to be unfair, the margin of error is such that the numbers could just as easily indicate that 50% of Americans think their taxes are fair, compared with 50% of Americans who think their taxes are unfair.  In other words, the poll’s conclusions are not as conclusive as they might seem. 2.       The poll was only of adults, not likely voters. When compared with polls of likely voters, polls of all adults tend to produce more left-leaning results. 3.       Around half of Americans will always say their taxes are fair—because they don’t owe any federal income tax. Even The New York Times agreed in 2010 that it was “not wrong” that 47% of Americans do not pay federal income taxes .  Of course the almost-half of Americans who pay no federal income tax would find their tax burden fair. In addition, most “mainstream” news sources glossed over the much more important statistic from the poll: that 62% of Americans favor cutting government spending as the main way the government should handle the deficit. Only 29% believe that taxes should be raised. Even if we were to narrow the gap with the margin of error, it would still leave us with 58% of Americans favoring spending cuts over tax increases. Most news sources, including the AP in its original article, mentioned this significant fact in passing, choosing instead to focus on the “most Americans think their taxes are fair” line. However, as HotAir explains , the 62/29 margin is “a much more significant divide than between those who believe their tax levels to be fair or not.” This is an obvious case of the media slanting a poll’s results: instead of focusing the reporting on the much more statistically significant number, they focused on the number that fit more with their agenda and ideological worldview.

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New AP Tax Poll Misses the Mark…as Do the Media

In the aftermath of the greatest electoral power shift since 1932, at least one anonymous Republican senator – and a few others who probably should be anonymous – have decided the first public sentiment worth expressing is how annoyed they are about losing Delaware. This is doubtless a preview of the thoughtful, steady hand at the tiller they plan to apply in guiding the new arrivals towards moderation and pragmatism next year. (Full article: “GOP senators fight over failure” here .) Significantly the good senators chose to vent their collective spleens to Politico , that bastion of down-the-middle reportage that has recently graced its pages with headlines like Sarah Palin is wreaking havoc on the campaign trail, GOP sources say , Next for GOP leaders: Stopping Sarah Palin , Joe Miller race now a referendum on Sarah Palin and my personal favorite Sarah Palin the biggest beneficiary of her own ‘Palin effect’ on midterm elections . (Someone raise their hand if they spot a leitmotif here.) When not fixated on Palin (I counted eleven posts in the last week , but then again nothing much else has been going on) Politico maintains a constant vigil on the Tea Party, which it seems to regard on evenly numbered days as an inconsequential tick on the behind of the body politic and on odd days as the end of the world as we know it. In the former category we find recent offerings like Obama vs. tea party: Think FDR vs. Huey Long and The long view of the tea party , which take the highly original tack of leveraging a false analogy to the populist movements of the 1930’s to arrive at manifestly dishonest conclusions about the Tea Party movement today, mostly in support of the “we’ve seen it all before, this too shall pass” argument. It doesn’t matter that Huey Long and Father Coughlin were to the left of Roosevelt and their movements agitated for bigger government not less, as long as you can muddle through to a conclusion like the one below. …the tea party might likely be seen as a passing summer storm — whose legacy is distinctly limited to what it accomplished in 2010. All of this is to say that any normally intelligent politician (yes, I appreciate the irony of that construction) should understand that a story suggesting division or discord within the Republican Party, especially at a time of one of its greatest triumphs, would be received by Politico like a Great Dane that just heard the word “bone,” but this doesn’t seem to have disturbed anyone’s equanimity. Indeed, if anything the cool, calm, pragmatic keepers of the “moderate” wing (not to be confused with a pack of “me first” sore losers like the Tea Partiers) seem to have said “to heck with it, let’s get some payback!”

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“Moderate” Senate Republicans See the Glass as Three-Hundredths Empty