More on the Greta Poll Discrepancy
Reported by Marie Therese - October 3, 2004 -
There have been numerous questions on the blog about the FOX News post-debate polling that took place on Friday. Originally, FOX posted a Greta Poll that had five categories, as follows: It was a tie, President Bush, Senator Kerry, I did not watch, none of the above. Around 6:00 PM EDT Friday this poll was pulled and a new one posted, the one that is on the site now. This may explain why some of our readers are confused about the seeming discrepancies in the tally of votes cast. I'm reprinting comments below made by one of our readers, Cieran, posted at 6:13 PM EDT, October 1, 2004 to the article "Vote in the FOX News Greta Poll." Cieran's words seem apropos to the discussion.
(Begin comments) HAHAHAHA! Did I call it or did I call it! Fox has already pulled the poll on who won the debate last night!"
They didn't post the poll on the website until late this morning, approximately 12 hours after the debate. The poll had an abnormally low count on voters: it ended at about 150,000 voters compared to MSNBC's 2.3 million and counting. While Fox's poll had almost the exact same % for Bush, the Kerry % was drastically different from every other news' polls.
As soon as Kerry started to get a lead on Fox's very own poll, it was pulled (after only being up for about 6 hours), while all the other new websites still have their polls up after 18 hours of being up.
Not only that, but the results for the "Who won?" poll are strangely missing from Fox's website. Fox has an archive of past Greta poll results but the last entry is Sept 24th, no record of the Oct 1 poll.
The poll that has replaced the "Who won" poll is "Did Thursday's presidential debate cause you to change your mind about your vote?" (End comments.)
N. B. I've written to FOX News requesting that they archive the results of the first Greta Poll. We'll see what happens.
