January 26, 2017
Here's One Poll The Press Doesn't Want You To See
JOHN MERLINE
Investors.com
As President Obama left the White House, the mainstream press was falling over itself proclaiming how popular he was.
"Obama leaving office on a very high note," was a typical headline.
Yet despite the media's fixation with polls, the press completely buried one of the more newsworthy poll findings — a Gallup report that came out last Friday, which took a final look at the President Obama's popularity over his eight years in office.
That poll found that Obama's overall average approval rating was a dismal 47.9%.
Only three presidents scored worse than Obama since Gallup started doing these surveys in 1945: never-elected Gerald Ford (47.2%), one-termer Jimmy Carter (45.4%), and Harry Truman (45.4%).
Obama even did worse overall than Richard Nixon, whose average approval was 49%, and was less popular overall than George W. Bush, who got an average 49.4%.
That sounds newsworthy, doesn't it? But you'd never know this if you relied on the mainstream press for information. That's because not one of them reported on Gallup's finding.
It took the conservative CNS News to break the media embargo. It reported on Gallup's findings on Monday, and its story got picked up by the influential Drudge Report. After that, a few other conservative news and blog sites reported the findings.
Beyond that: total media blackout.
It's true that Obama's ratings started to climb as the end of his term neared. In the IBD/TIPP poll, Obama's approval rating was 57% in his last month in office. This uptrend got widespread coverage, with lots of comparisons about how he stacked up against other presidents as they left office.
Obama also had high approval ratings when he came into office, which also got huge coverage. His initial approval rating in the IBD/TIPP poll was 75.3%.
But what about in between?
As Gallup notes: "After his first year, he received sustained majority approval only once more during his first term in office," and "shortly after his second term began, his support dipped back into the 40s and did not return to the majority level again until his final year in office."
In other words, the public had high hopes for Obama when he came into office, and liked him when he was largely irrelevant in his final months. But while Obama was actually governing, the public consistently disapproved of the job he was doing.
Yes, he won re-election. But he did so with 2 million fewer votes than he got in 2008, against a weak Republican opponent, and aided by a fawning media. Obama's approval ratings fell again almost as soon as the election was over.
That story never got told, because for eight long years a smitten press desperately tried to avoid covering anything that made Obama look bad.
Hiding news that doesn't fit an ideological or a partisan agenda is perhaps the worst form of media bias. And it's one more reason the public holds the press is such low esteem.
http://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/news-flash-obama-was-an-historically-unpopular-president/
Gold is $1,581/oz today. When it hits $2,000, it will be up 26.5%. Let's see how long that takes. - De 3/11/2013 - ANSWER: 7 Years, 5 Months
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