Friday, March 21, 2008
Chavez played key role in standoff
More than half of Venezuelans say President Hugo Chavez played a key role in diffusing tensions in South America amid a diplomatic spat involving three nations. Venezuelan pollster Veneop SA found that 56 percent of Venezuelans polled said Chavez played an important role in ending the hostilities with Ecuador and Colombia, after Colombian forces entered Ecuador to kill a Colombian rebel leader.
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Here we go: 'government-by-poll' again. There's so much wrong with using these sorts of surveys, to manipulate people and to pressure governments -- even if in this particular case it's not some vicious pack of lies being pushed.
ReplyDeleteJust for starters: what you're actually doing is asking people their opinions based what perceptions they get from the constant stream of propaganda and disinformation they are assaulted with daily. And so already you're taking skewed data and essentially "laundering" it -- just like traffickers launder money, actually. And then suddenly, people's manipulated prejudices and superficial grasp of phenomena and skin-deep stereotypes somehow become an "objective" measure of their heartfelt beliefs and considered opinions. Which becomes the basis for all sorts of claims... which feed back into a new round of distortions and disinfo. Repeat ad nauseam.
It is a huge scam -- and should be recognized and dealt-with as such. And it sometimes is, with the banning of "polls" before many elections, for example. However, the malign rôle of the mass-media and "polling", etc., is not being sufficiently dealt-with as the manipulative threat to democratic practice that it is.