Hi everybody Cheryl Ackison here. Welcome to another edition of the Cheryl Ackison

podcast. Today I want to talk about polls. on the

on one hand I do think polls got kind of a bad rap in 2016

because it's not as though all the polls were necessarily wrong.

It's that as I dug into them, the headlines that newspeople wrote from the polls

and the way they selectively reported the data was sometimes misleading when

the polls themselves may have had accurate information in there.

Then again, there were some polls that were completely wrong over time, especially those that early and often said that President Trump had no chance and was at the bottom of the pack, could never be the nominee, and so on. But here we are again coming

into campaign 2020, and we in the media promised to rethink and re-examine what we'd done wrong in 2016, but I don't see a lot of evidence that we're actually doing that.

I still see that we, in the media, appear to be trying to use polls like we did in 2015 and 2016 not so much as a way to

reflect or measure public opinion but to try to sway it.

And you can tell by the way the polls are reported

that the people behind the stories

are trying to influence you to think a certain way

or believe that a certain candidate has no chance or is the best candidate.

Let's look at one such poll that may or may not in the end be accurate as to how

things come out when it comes to the Trump impeachment push, but I dug into it to look at the stats and numbers behind it and found some interesting things, much as I did in 2015 and 2016.

There was a CBS News poll with the headline that

the majority of Americans favor an impeachment inquiry into President Trump, 55% to 45%.

So that was pretty big news when that came out of CBS News poll saying that a majority of Americans by 10 percentage points favored the impeachment inquiry

that definitely showed some movement on that opinion. But what if there is more

than meets the eye to that?

...