C-BS Has Bush at 34%

The left is crowing about the new CBS poll which shows President Bush's approval rating at just 34%. However, anyone who understands polling knows it's possible to get pretty much any response you want, depending on the nature of your sample. Greg Sheffield at Newsbusters.org points out some problems with the CBS sample:

In its classic "fair and balanced" tradition, CBS slanted in favor of Democrats its poll that found Bush has a 34 percent approval rating and a 59 percent disapproval rating, an all-time high for a CBS poll.

On the bottom of the PDF version of the poll (page 18) it says how many Democrats versus Republicans were contacted.

"Total Republicans" contacted: 272 unweighted and 289 weighted.

"Total Democrats" contacted: 409 unweighted and 381 weighted.

"Total Independents" contacted: 337 unweighted and 348 weighted.

Brent Baker also noted how CBS failed to highlight a key portion of its poll on the Feb. 27 "CBS Evening News." 66 percent of respondents thought the media devoted "too much time" to Cheney's hunting accident.

To put things in perspective, Scott Ott reminds us that at least the president is still more popular than the CBS Evening News.