Reuters announced its latest poll results on Monday: “Republicans see Obama as more imminent threat than Putin.” Republican views were deemed as the most newsworthy ones, because they sound vaguely unpatriotic about the president.
Reporter Roberta Rampton began: “A third of Republicans believe President Barack Obama poses an imminent threat to the United States, outranking concerns about Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.”
A Reuters/Ipsos online poll this month asked 2,809 Americans to rate how much of a threat a list of countries, organizations and individuals posed to the United States on a scale of 1 to 5, with one being no threat and 5 being an imminent threat.
The poll showed 34 percent of Republicans ranked Obama as an imminent threat, ahead of Putin (25 percent), who has been accused of aggression in the Ukraine, and Assad (23 percent). Western governments have alleged that Assad used chlorine gas and barrel bombs on his own citizens.
“How much of a threat is Barack Obama to the United States?” is a fairly vague question. Does it mean Obama is a threat to national security? Or could it be that Obama is a threat to maintaining some vestige of a free-market system or constitutional republic? That’s what makes the facile comparisons with security threats like Putin misleading, or to borrow from “Politifact,” the finding is “Half True,” in that it can be seen as lacking context. Is the question about foreign policy or domestic policy?
Rampton’s story never mentioned they also tried this question with House Speaker John Boehner (with 14 percent of Democrats checking the “imminent threat” box). But she noted “Twenty-seven percent of Republicans saw the Democratic Party as an imminent threat to the United States, and 22 percent of Democrats deemed Republicans to be an imminent threat.”
Could Reuters be demonstrating bias by question selection? As James Taranto joked at The Wall Street Journal: “Five bucks to the first reader who sends us a link to the parallel Reuters/Ipsos poll circa 2003 that tested Democratic attitudes toward President Bush and Saddam Hussein.”
