Zogby Poll Smears Mark Lloyd
Posted October 29th, 2009 by Jordan Berg
The unfounded attacks against Mark Lloyd, the Federal Communications Commission’s chief diversity officer, have reached a new low.
FAIR’s Peter Hart spotted an appalling Zogby poll question that was clearly biased against Lloyd, a distinguished journalist, scholar and civil rights leader.
It reads:
Federal Communications Commission Chief Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd wants the FCC to force good white people in positions of power in the broadcast industry to step down to make room for more African-Americans and gays to fill those positions. Do you agree or disagree that this presents a threat to free speech?
This is a classic push poll. The question twists comments Lloyd made way out of context, to suggest some secret FCC agenda to force white people from their jobs. It’s no different from calling people up and saying, “If you knew Barack Obama beat his dog, would that make you more or less likely to vote for him?”
As Nate Silver of the highly respected fivethirtyeight.com blog explains:
To be clear about the issue at hand, there is a distinction between a merely leading question — merely couching a statement of fact in favorable terminology — and a misleading one — reporting a highly questionable statement as fact to the respondent. To imply from Lloyd’s statements that the FCC is considering pursuing a policy of forced resignation for white broadcast personalities seems pretty far over the line. That the question as posed is highly racially charged is somewhat tangential to the ethical issue at hand, although it arguably raises the stakes and may certainly further indict John Zogby’s judgment.
The idea that efforts to diversify media ownership pit “white people” against “African-Americans and gays” speaks to a divisive time that I had hoped we’d put behind us. That Zogby employs such racially divisive language to create a biased poll is deeply disturbing.
According to ChattahBox.com (h/t to Lisa Fager of Industry Ears), the poll questions were co-authored by conservative pundit and direct marketer Brad O’Leary to use in promoting his book Shut Up America – the End of Free Speech, which purports to expose an Obama administration plot “to ration speech like the old Soviet Union rationed wages and food.”
ChattahBox.com also posts the transcript of Lloyd’s remarks at the 2005 National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis that Zogby and O’Leary misrepresent. Of course, those trying to smear Lloyd can’t be bothered with facts, context or nuance.
This is all part of a larger effort to slander Lloyd and marginalize his work at the FCC. Last month, after Lloyd became the target of attacks from conservative talk show hosts including Glenn Beck, more than 50 civil rights, public interest and grassroots organizations — including the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the National Urban League, ColorofChange.org and the Communications Workers of America — signed a letter supporting Lloyd and the agency’s longstanding mission to promote localism, diversity and competition in the media.
To be clear: There’s no secret plot at the FCC. But there is an obligation at the agency, mandated by Congress, to find ways to increase media ownership by Americans who historically were restricted from such ownership. This makes sense: The FCC should work to increase ownership by women, people of color and other disadvantaged groups so that our media system reflects the dynamism that makes this country great.
But despite the requirement to pursue policies that increase diversity, competition and local ownership, our media system has been falling into fewer and fewer hands. As Free Press showed in Out of the Picture (PDF) and Off the Dial (PDF) the miniscule levels of media ownership by people of color and women are a national disgrace.
When ownership reflects the full range of experiences and backgrounds in America, the result will be media that are more entertaining, creative and informative, and we will all benefit. For that reason, women, people of color, young people, the poor, and other disadvantaged communities deserve opportunities to own parts of our media system.
We need more voices, not less. Yet Zogby and O’Leary are still trying to divide us by race in 2009. Really? Those tactics should have been left in 1869.
