Brian Williams’ Religion Question to Romney: Borderline Mendacity
Note: This post has been corrected here.
I’ve had a chance to look at the NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll that Brian Williams referenced in the GOP debate last night, and it seems very clear that Williams’s question is simply outrageous. Whether he intended to or not, Williams (1) added unsupported “gloss” to the poll and (2) ignored virtually identical data about the other Republican candidates.
Here is Williams’ question, from the MSNBC transcript:
Williams: Governor, we’ve got an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll coming out in the morning that says, among a lot of other things, 44 percent of respondents say a Mormon president would have a difficult time uniting the country. And I know you’ve answered similar questions about what you were able to do with the Catholic vote in Massachusetts, but 44 percent nationally, writ large, is a large number.
(Emphasis added. The video of Williams’ question, and Romney’s answer, is in the “Straight from the Source” box in the top right corner of the blog.)
The question is wonderfully sensational, but it’s so completely wrong as to border on mendacious. Here are the poll’s questions and the data. Go to page 6of the PDF document. The polling question to which Williams must be referring is this:
25. One of the goals people have mentioned as important for the next president to have is the ability to unite all Americans around goals and objectives for the country and to reduce the partisan fighting in Congress. I would like to list various presidential candidates. Please tell me whether you feel this person would be very successful, fairly successful, not too successful, or not at all successful in uniting the nation. **
THIS TABLE HAS BEEN RANKED BY THE PERCENTAGE WHO SAY VERY OR FAIRLY SUCCESSFUL Very Successful Fairly Successful Not Too Successful Not At All Successful Not Sure Barack Obama …………………………… 27 40 14 12 7 [257] John McCain ……………………………… 20 46 16 10 8 [256] Hillary Clinton …………………………….. 25 30 14 27 4 [252] John Edwards …………………………….. 13 39 18 21 9 [253] Rudy Giuliani ……………………………… 13 35 20 26 6 [254] Mike Huckabee …………………………… 9 33 24 19 15 [255] Mitt Romney ………………………………. 8 33 22 22 15 [258]
Apparently based on that poll question and those data, Williams formed his question to Romney, stating that “44 percent of respondents say a Mormon president would have a difficult time uniting the country.”
Several observations:
1. First, the gloss: Or should I say, distortion? The question asked says nothing about Mormonism, or even about religion at all. So there is no way to interpret the data as suggesting that those 44% say a Mormon president “would have a difficult time uniting the country.” To get there Williams had to assume that the 44% number had something to do with Romney’s Mormonism. That’s why the term “mendacious” comes to mind.
2. Now the ignored data: Williams’ 44% number for Romney is derived by combining two columns of data above — the 22% in the “not too successful” column plus the 22% in the “not at all successful” column. Looking at those same two columns, Huckabee has scores of 24% and 19%, or 43%, one point less than Romney; and Giuliani has 20% and 26%, or 46% (two points higher than Romney’s total). And yet those candidates got no question about their ability to unite the country.
Certainly Williams could have said, “43 percent of respondents say a Baptist president would have a difficult time uniting the country,” or that “46 percent of respondents say a twice-divorced Catholic president would have a difficult time uniting the country.” But he didn’t. It looks like Williams singled out Romney and added Romney’s faith into the analysis, falsely representing that the data showed a specific concern about Mormonism. Why?
One result of this misleading journalism: Thanks to Williams, millions of debate viewers probably now believe that 44% of Americans think “a Mormon president would have a difficult time uniting the country,” when there is no support for such a claim.
It sure looks like NBC and Brian Williams have some explaining to do.
Update: Welcome, Hugh Hewitt readers. Hugh asks an excellent question: “Did a staffer impose an interpretation on the data that Williams was unaware of?”
We hope we get an answer. Look at the video of Williams asking the question. He’s clearly reading it. My guess is that he got some bad staff work. My own question: Is this merely sloppiness, or is some bias at work here?
Posted in News Media Bias, Religious Bigotry | 6 Comments » | 
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jon on 25 Jan 2008 at 12:15 pm #
Williams’ cheap shot reminds me of a time honored salesman’s rule that no matter how much lipstick and perfume you put on a pig, in the end, you’re still looking at a pig. Williams was obviously trying to throw Mitt off his game and he failed to do so in spectacular fashion and ended up looking like a fool.
To borrow a baseball analogy, Williams tried to throw at Mitt’s head and he ended up giving Mitt a high hanging curve ball which Mitt promptly blasted the cover off.
coltakashi on 25 Jan 2008 at 2:55 pm #
Brian Williams sees everything through his own suppositions. He looks at Romney and sees “Mormon”. He is seeking something negative to say about Romney, because he is Mormon. This allows him to distort the “facts” and think that he has not done so, because that is how Brian Williams sees the world. It is called bias and prejudice.
If people recognized their biases, the biases would have less hold on their perceptions, and they would have more skepticism of their own perceptions on subjects related to their bias. But clearly, Brian Williams has never felt a reason to question his bias against Mormons or Romney. No one in his circle of friends or co-workers has a contrasting viewpoint, they all lean the same way, so they all think they are standign straight and tall together.
I would love to have an objective entity, such as the Pew Trust, interview people like Brian Williams and other “opinion leaders” and ask them questions that would smoke out the extent of their knowledge about various groups in society, like Mormons and Evangelicals, and test their perceptions of reality. My guess is that the biases on this score would correlate highly with their general political leanings that are manifested in their own voting and campaign contribution habits. But they are too rich and too sacrosanct for their “objectivity” to even be questioned or determined objectively. And the LDS Church knows that it makes no headway if it, by itself, raises questions about such bias, because it would just give such powerful people one more reason to be biased against them. Better to maintain good relations with them, so that you can work around their biases and get your own message out.
I remember that, in the extended interview Tom Brokaw (Williams’ predecessor at NBC) held with LDS President Gordon B. Hinckley in 2002, during the Olympics, Brokaw asked a question that showed he assumed that ordinary Sunday meetings of Mormons were closed to non-Mormons. He was confusing Sunday worship with the more sacred and private ordinances (like marriage) that take place in the LDS temples. Brokaw could not have read much of the information packet about the LDS Church that he got before the interview if he still had that idea in his head.
The entire nature of the survey question is pretty weird. It asks people to guess what OTHER people are going to think about the candidates, rather than express what they themselves think or feel, something they actually know. Since the average citizen has no way of knowing what ALL Americans’ views are, at best they can only reflect BACK to the pollsters and the news media what the MEDIA are themselves telling people, both explicitly and implicitly. This survey is therefore a mirror of the news media and its own ability to affect, and in this case confuse, public opinion. This is simply not data. As shown by Williams, it is just a funhouse mirror that reflects reality in any way he wants, simply by ignoring things he doesn’t want to see and magnifying out of proportion the things he likes.
fitzwdarcey on 25 Jan 2008 at 2:59 pm #
This is disturbing. Brian Williams seems to have made up the reasoning behind 44% of individual answers without any substantive data to back it up. Furthermore, the numbers he cherry picked are odd.
The worst thing about it, however, is that people won’t question NBC. They will simply accept it. I know that when I heard the question, I was frustrated that Williams asked it, but I never questioned the validity of the claim.
People will believe this. This maligns American people. Evangelicals in particular will be looked at suspiciously for this, and there is no reason for it. Furthermore, how many people are going to look at a number like that and wonder if they should question a Mormon’s ability to unite the country. This is almost incidious.
coltakashi on 25 Jan 2008 at 3:11 pm #
One more point: Williams referred to a poll that had not been released to the public, so there was no opportunity for any candidate to see it for themselves or question Williams’ accuracy. We are asked to trust Williams without any objective verification. Obviously, that trust was misplaced. This selective use of an, at the time, secret poll to ambush a candidate is a demonstration of pure unfairness and unprofessionalism. It is dropping a roadside bomb just for the fun of seeing the reaction on camera, and leaving a false impression with the public, even while you know that it is unfair to the candidate to use a poll in this way, even if what you said about its results was objectively accurate.
Brian Williams thus demonstrates that his journalism hero is Michael Moore. Williams’ attitude is “Ethics? Ethics? We don’t need no stinkin’ ethics!”
Any thinking person knows that the only reason opinion polls are given prominence by the major news media is to sway public opinion, a large part of which is ready to assume that anything the media tells them is true. (In my personal experience, when I have known the facts of a story first hand, the accuracy rate is more like 50%, and alarge part of the media actually glory in the notion that the perceptions they create are more important than the objective truth.) Williams made his statement in order to influence voters into thinking that, if they wanted to be with a large part of Americans, they had to agree with Williams. Specifically, even if they like Romney per se, to be skeptical of his chances as a candidate.
I would put this exercise in distorting public opinion in order to affect an election with the dirty job the TV networks did on George W. Bush in 2000, announcing that Gore had won Florida when the polls in the westertn panhandle were still open. It was not only erroneous in fact, it was obvious that the timing of the announcement would affect the vote count in the more conservative part of Florida, not to mention in other states that were still voting, because putting Florida into Gore’s column at that point appeared to give him most of an electoral majority!
I enjoy it when Brian Williams mocks himself on Jay Leno’s show or with Conan O’Brien. But he needs to step down from his ego throne and remember that it is not his right to throw bombs under the tires of any candidate.
4thnephite on 25 Jan 2008 at 3:29 pm #
Consider the source of the polls, who take them, and they all have a hidden agenda.
I look at the by-line, then make up my mind if I need to read it, polls are the same way
Brian William, I sure is a nice guy, but does he not get a pay check from NBC, enough said.
God Bless, Joe
kermit on 25 Jan 2008 at 5:04 pm #
“We have a poll that will be released tomorrow morning that shows 44% of Americans believe a Black Man will have difficulty uniting the country…..” Can you just imagine if THAT were Brian Williams’ comment last night????? What would the MSM be doing today????? They’d be going nuts. When will this garbage STOP??????