Polls Conducted the Daily Show Way

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=156231&title=team-daily-polls


Watching the Daily Show last week was a perfect time to get some good satire and political commentary as it was the week of Super Tuesday and voting to pick nominees was in full swing. And just as we’ve come to expect, Jon Stewart and company managed to mock the cable news networks for their roles in the political process. This time the Daily Show was targeting the significance of polls. Polls have become incredibly important to newscasters and political commentators who must fill at least some of their time slots with “analysis” of the numbers and predictions for what will happen in the future.

This is great fodder for a satirical show like the Daily Show, which has thrived when it hits hard at Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, or any other news program out there. This particular piece, assembled by many of the contributors to the show, begins with a direct hit to the pollsters and news shows. It seemingly mocks these programs for failing to make accurate predictions concerning the New Hampshire primary last month. A clip of an “expert” pointing out a massive lead for Obama is shown, setting up the premise of the following segment. When Hillary Clinton was declared the winner, the validity and relevance of polls were immediately questioned. The question being raised by Jon Stewart is that if polls are often wrong, why is that so and who is to blame?

The segment quickly cuts to reporter John Oliver interviewing a professional pollster who appears to be utterly reasonable and intelligent. The pollster comments that polls are simply a snapshot of people’s opinions and can in no way be used to predict future outcomes. This astute offering of advice is contrasted with John Oliver’s ludicrous behavior. He swears while conducting the interview and then proceeds to challenge the pollster and announce his own effort to execute a more successful poll. The basis for this new kind of poll is intimidation. The Daily Show pollsters would scare the people they interviewed into not changing their minds and therefore rendering their results worthless. So the answer reached by the Daily Show team is that polls are often wrong because the voters flip-flop on who they support. Because of this, an accurate poll must include unchanging, static opinions.

What ensues is a series of very funny confrontations with innocent and unsuspecting voters in New York, who reveal who they support in the election and are then threatened and yelled at by the Daily Show staff. A mother and father give their answers and Samantha Bee takes their small children as “insurance.” Rob Riggle decides to break a man’s finger because he appears to be lying. The humor is successful because it’s all about incongruities. No one expects professional newscasters or professional pollsters to repeatedly swear at people or to continually threaten to “break their bodies.” The thought of these supposedly professional individuals engaging in such absurd behavior is genuinely funny. The segment itself is a parody of the cable new networks who take these polls so seriously, and the high level of sarcasm is palpable. Obviously, no sane person would recommend actually implementing the Daily Show form of polling. But according to Jon Stewart and his team, this is the only feasible way to fix the polling problem. The purpose of this piece, like many others on the Daily Show, is to ridicule cable news networks while simultaneously discussing topical, relevant issues that, in this case, pertain to the 2008 election.