Keith Olbermann brought up the issue during his broadcast last night, Brian Stelter over at TV Newser brought it up a little earlier in the day and I've wondered about it since I first looked at the latest Opinion Dynamics poll (.pdf) a couple of days back: It appears that Fox News is, as Chris alluded to Thursday night, instructing its polling outfit to poll test an anti-Democratic Party message. Stelter has the details.

An e-mailer notices that "Fox News asked some very curious questions in a poll released yesterday."

It asked, "do you think a television network that is hosting a presidential debate can influence the outcome of that debate?" 65 percent said yes.

Then the poll questions got even more interesting. The e-mailer thinks "Fox is testing its own anti-Democratic Party and anti-MoveOn.org messaging," adding: "Political operations do message testing like this, but I've never seen a news organization use (or need) the tactic."

You decide; here's the poll:

34.  Do you think a television network that is hosting a presidential debate can influence the outcome of that debate?

35.  If a political party agrees to participate in debates hosted by one television network but refuses to do debates hosted by another network, do you think it is fair to say the party is picking the network it believes is more aligned with its views and so would ask easier questions during the debate?

36.  After the 2004 presidential election, the president of the left-wing Moveon.org political action committee made the following comment about the Democratic Party, "In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive.  Now it's our Party:  we bought it, we own it and we're going to take it back." Do you think the Democratic Party should allow a grassroots organization like Moveon.org to take it over or should it resist this type of takeover?

The emailer is correct in noting the unprecedented nature of a purported news organization poll testing a political attack of this nature. But this is far from the only aspect of the polling commissioned this month by Fox News that further belies the already patently false notion that it is a news organization rather than a propaganda arm of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Take a quick look at the ordering and wording of these two questions towards the end of the survey.

39.  Who do you trust more to decide when U.S. troops should leave Iraq -- U.S. military commanders or Members of Congress?  (ROTATE)

40.  Last week the U.S. House voted to remove U.S. troops from Iraq by no later than September 2008 -- would you describe this as a correct and good decision or a dangerous and bad decision?

The order of these two questions evidence a significant priming bias, also known in statistics as the "order effect". Although it would not be possible to find out the magnitude of this bias without running a second poll that reorders the questions (and perhaps even asks every question just as Opinion Dynamics did, but in a different order), suffice it to say that on the surface there is real reason to believe that the fact that these two questions were asked back-to-back was not accidental but was rather to artificially lower the number of respondents answering that there should be a withdrawal of troops by September 2008 -- a number that was already affected by the unbalanced language of the second question (correct and dangerous are not opposites as good and bad are).

As a result of this fairly clear partisan hackery on the part of Fox News, I think its right time I joined Chris is shying away from even the discussion of polling commissioned by the network, let alone its obviously biased attempts at reporting.