The Walt Disney Company’s far-left ABC News (led by President Kimberly Godwin, pictured above), one of America’s chief spreaders of lies, hate, and deliberate misinformation, is openly threatening to blacklist Rasmussen Reports from FiveThirtyEight.
The dictionary says this is the definition of extortion: “the practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats.” Read on and decide for yourself…
According to Rasmussen, the pollster has been receiving that’s-a-nice-business-you-got-there-be-a-shame-if-anything-happened-to-it emails from some ABC News thug named Elliott Morris, who says he is the editorial director of Data Analytics at ABC News. Apparently, being the editorial director of Data Analytics at ABC News means he gets to decide which pollsters are added to ABC’s FiveThirtyEight polling aggregation site, the site founded by Nate Silver.
Nate Silver at “On The Fault Lines: Decision 2018” Midterm Election Panel on October 25, 2018, in New York City (Photo by Krista Kennell/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images).
Well, Thug Morris sounds as though he’s angry because Rasmussen has appeared on Fox News and Steve Bannon’s War Room, so Thug Morris is threatening to remove Rasmussen from the FiveThirtyEight site unless–and this is something straight from the McCarthyism Playbook–Rasmussen replies with “satisfactory comments” that “explain the nature of [Rasmussen’s] relationship with several right-leaning blogs and online media outlets, which have given us reason to doubt the ethical operation of the polling firm.”
Steve Bannon, former White House Chief Strategist to U.S. President Donald Trump, speaks at a debate with Lanny Davis, former special counsel to Bill Clinton, at Zofin Palace on May 22, 2018, in Prague, Czech Republic (Sean Gallup/Getty Images).
What does an appearance on a particular outlet have to do with the validity and results of Rasmussen’s polling, which is better than most? Good grief, according to FiveThirtyEight itself, Rasmussen is a better pollster than–wait for it, wait for it–ABC News.
That’s the least of the Disney/ABC News McCarthyism. The following is straight out of “When did you stop beating your wife?”:
Please tell us whether questions are ever suggested to Rasmussen from these outlets, including Fox News and “Steve Bannon’s War Room”, where Rasmussen’s head pollster regularly appears, with the promise of coverage in return for “public” fieldwork? Do Rasmussen’s pollsters work with anyone from these organizations on topics to consider polling, despite listing polls as un-sponsored or sponsored by other groups? Does the pollster have a close personal relationship with any of these figures that might cloud their judgement in the operation of a public poll?
This is beyond the beyond. This is outright Nazi tactics. ABC News is obviously desperate to discredit and blacklist Rasmussen. But since the results of Rasmussen’s polling (the only thing that should matter) cannot be questioned, the Brownshirts at ABC News are hurling wild accusations without a shred of evidence to back them up. And it is worth repeating that if you want to see a truly bad pollster that actually deserves to be discredited, I give you the reliably dreadful ABC News/Washington Post poll, which has become a national joke–even at FiveThirtyEight:
For what it’s worth, I have had a professional relationship with Rasmussen for more than a decade, and not once has the pollster behaved unprofessionally in any way whatsoever.
It gets worse… ABC News is demanding Rasmussen reveal its trade secrets…
“Second, Rasmussen must answer the following questions about its methodology, which [Rasmussen] has so far failed to answer for FiveThirtyEight senior reporter Nathaniel Rakich three times,” reads the extortion letter. Below that smug huff are nine detailed questions inquiring into Rasmussen’s methodology. Hey, maybe ABC News is looking to find a way to improve its own lousy polling?
The smug email closes this with a Margaret Dumont Huff:
Failure to reply, or failure to notify us of an intent to speedily reply, by the end of the day on Friday, June 30th, 2023 will be taken as a final concession of our grounds for a ban. The ban would take effect imminently thereafter.
My reply would be six words: Stick it in your ass, Adolf.
To his credit, Silver, who is no longer part of the FiveThirtyEight site he founded, was horrified at his former employer’s extortion tactics and compared it to the Spanish Inquisition:
This is exactly the kind of indecent, entitled, arrogant, partisan, bullying, and fascist behavior we have come to expect from the overall corporate media and The Disney Grooming Syndicate.
Anything ABC News can do to further discredit itself is okay with me.
Tactics like these only hasten the corporate media’s irrelevance. Nothing damages the media more than when they show us who they truly are. So I would like to personally thank Thug Morris for this reveal.