Andrea Mitchell apparently disagrees with her own network’s polling services after dismissing a poll that shows that Americans agree with the CIA’s advanced interrogation tactics.
Mitchell was on her MSNBC show on Tuesday, December 16, when the topic of the recent Senate CIA report came up. While she reported her own network’s polling, she certainly didn’t seem to believe it.
The poll Mitchell wasn’t buying was an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released earlier that day. The poll revealed that 51 percent of respondents felt that the interrogation practices used during the Bush era were acceptable. Only 28 percent said they went too far and were wrong.
But speaking to NBC’s chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel, Mitchell warned her audience against her own network’s polling, saying that polling is “always an imprecise measure because of the way questions are asked.”
Engel seemed to agree with Mitchell’s intimation that the poll could be wrong. He told Mitchell that those who answered the poll were just responding emotionally and that they might be proven morally wrong by “history.”
Then Mitchell seemed to announce her distrust of democracy itself, saying, “Should public opinion really be setting policy?”
Engel was happy to join Mitchell with the mistrust of the people, replying, “Exactly.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston