To Poll or Not to Poll

I was greatly impressed with the admition of the authors of the website retropoll.org that they tell viewers not to trust their margin of errors since only about 1 out of 4 of the people they call actually care to continue the phone conversation and answer the questions. And since many of the questions are "if" or "should" questions, such as: Should Israel abide by the United Nations resolutions that require Israel to return all Israeli settlers to within its UN established borders? - there's really no telling if the said margin of error is accurate.

In any event, I found this particular aspect of Media and Politics to be quite informative. After the reading the assigned materials, I checked out a poll done by the organization "RetroPoll". I quoted it above but will expand on it here. Their basic methodology and mission is to expose delusions of the people which they attribute to none other than the mass media. Their polls are of a random nature, with this particular poll that I observed being: Native American (4.4%), Asian/Pacific Islander (2.4%), African American (15.6%), Latin American (11.7%), European-American (57.6%), Decline to State (5.9%), Biracial (2.4%). The article "The Nation in a Room", by James S. Fishkin of the Boston Review discourages the use of random polling claiming that the people are not properly informed on the subjects and therefore will only give you the basic headline answers that they ususally hear. This is, for the most part true. I think that the organizaton RetroPoll understands this at its most fundamental level and uses it to form their mission. They want those headline answers. Their out there to see how educated the people really are, I don't think they are your usual run-of-the-mill pollsters who are out to endorse some product or some campaign, they are out to prove the true difficulty in polling!