Gallup's CEO is #1 on iMediaEthics Sixth Annual Top Ten "Dubious Polling" Awards

NEW YORK, Feb. 10, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- iMediaEthics announces its Sixth Top 10 Dubious Polling Awards.

At the top of this year's annual awards is the Rolling Over in His Grave Award, won by Gallup's CEO, Jim Clifton, for engaging in activity "that could wake the deceased founder."

Clifton earned that dubious honor after the esteemed polling organization had to pay a multi-million dollar fine to the U.S. government.

Some of the other awards include:

• Let's Wait and See What Happens Award, to Public Policy Polling, for not releasing the results of a poll – until after the election – because the results didn't meet their expectation.
• Pointing the Finger Award, to HuffPost Pollster et.al., for implicitly blaming the public – not the pollsters – for contradictory polling results.
• Goldilocks and Three Bears Award, given to three of the top media polling organizations – Pew, Rasmussen and Gallup – for producing three strikingly different results on immigration reform.
• Having Their Cake and Eating It, Too Award, to the media pollsters, who acknowledge that most people don't have fixed opinion on most issues, but nevertheless produce poll results showing upwards of 90% of their respondents with fixed opinions.

Each year, David Moore, a former Gallup pollster and iMediaEthics polling director, presents his satirical look at some of the most dubious poll stories of the past year.

Read the full list of winners on iMediaEthics.

David W. Moore is a Senior Fellow with the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. He is a former Vice President of the Gallup Organization and was a senior editor with the Gallup Poll for thirteen years. He is author of The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls (Beacon, 2008; trade paperback edition, 2009).

iMediaEthics is published by Art Science Research Laboratory, a not-for-profit co-founded by its director, Rhonda Roland Shearer, an artist, art historian and award winning journalist, and her late husband, Harvard professor and scientist Stephen Jay Gould. ASRL promotes the media's use of scientific methods and experts before publication.

SOURCE iMediaEthics