SWS survey report on Sara impeachment maliciously false
THE Social Weather Stations (SWS) report released by the Philippine News Agency said its poll showed 41 percent of “Filipinos” support the impeachment complaint against Vice President Sara Duterte was colossally wrong, deliberately and maliciously manufactured. Fake news, if you will.
The authentic news, using the details of the SWS data, is that 55 percent of the SWS respondents were not even aware of the impeachment complaint or had little knowledge of it. While 19 percent agreed with it, some 27 percent opposed the impeachment move, were undecided, or said they did not know enough to give a response.
The poll was intended as a last-resort propaganda move, paid (“commissioned”) allegedly for P5 million by the dubious anti-China outfit ADR Stratbase, reportedly on behalf of the Marcos-Romualdez duo to help convince congressmen to approve it asap. The plan was to “fast-break” it before the Christmas break, in the manner in which the House voted to impeach ousted President Joseph Estrada in 2001 in a few hours’ time and relay it to the Senate to undertake the trial. The poll would justify the rush to impeach Sara before the year ends, or so they thought.
Indeed, right after the report was released, congressmen who were with the notorious quad com that raised the charges — Jay Khonghun of Zambales and Paolo Ortega of La Union — claimed that the poll “reflect[s] the public outrage over the alleged confidential fund misuse and other issues: numbers don’t lie.” But numbers are easily used by liars, as the cliché goes.
Fallacy
It doesn’t take rocket science to expose the fallacy of the SWS poll report using its own data.
The SWS poll asked 2,160 Filipinos about their views on the impeachment. A huge 53 percent, or 1,145, said they weren’t aware of such a move to remove Sara as vice president. That is the poll’s main finding that despite the massive black propaganda the Marcos-Romualdez gang undertook for several months last year, with the House hearings even televised, most Filipinos don’t know what it is about.
The main SWS finding, which, however, it disregarded, wrongly portrays Filipinos’ view of the impeachment (SWS statement).
The SWS’ fatal flaw, a deliberate one I think, is that it disregarded this 53 percent of respondents as if they didn’t exist and used as the base for its calculations only the 47 percent (1,015) who replied that they were aware of the complaint. This cut its sample by more than half to a level that the resulting margin of error made the poll of 1,015 people useless.
Out of these 1,015 responses, the SWS reported that 41 percent backed the impeachment, while 35 percent disagreed with it, 19 percent were undecided, and 5 didn’t know enough about it to make a reply.
However, if we instead use — correctly — the SWS’ total 2,160 respondents as the sample, we come up with only 19 percent wanting Sara to be impeached. Some 16 percent are against it, and 64 percent are either not aware of it, are undecided, or “don’t know enough to respond.”
Hilt
Those numbers present a vastly different picture from the “4 out of ten Filipinos want Sara impeached” that nearly all media reported.
Anti-Duterte politicians and commentators exploited the SWS fake report to the hilt.
Former senator Leila de Lima, asked by ANC to react on the 1.8 million who attended nationwide rallies for “peace and unity” led by the Iglesia Ni Cristo, said:
“Let’s call a spade a spade,” referring to the reality that while the Iglesia rally was a call for unity, it was really a demonstration of the massive support for Sara.
“But that number of rallyists for Sara isn’t bigger than the 41 percent of the population that the SWS reported want the impeachment to push through. We are a democracy, and the 41 percent representing tens of millions of Filipinos, according to the SWS poll, is the majority beating the ‘minority’ of rally attendees.” If we follow de Lima’s logic, we don’t need to undertake expensive elections; we just undertake surveys.
In a similar nonsensical argument, occasional columnist Richard Heydarian, in a screaming post on Facebook, revealed his utter ignorance of the nature of opinion polls, which is a major tool of political science that he claims is his expertise: “FACT: More than FORTY PERCENT of Filipinos Support Impeachment of VP Sara… that’s TENS OF MILLIONS of folks!!!
Obviously, this purported political scientist can’t distinguish between theoretical tools of estimating political support — polls — and facts on the ground, which the 1.8 million participating in the INC-led rally the other day proved.
In claiming that 41 percent of respondents supported the impeachment complaint, the SWS blatantly violated two major principles of opinion polling.
Obscure
First, the issue it asked its respondents to give their views on (“impeachment”) was one which is obviously obscure to most Filipinos and even one they had no knowledge of. Even as SWS found that 53 percent of their respondents were not aware of impeachment against the vice president, SWS still pushed through with it, distorting the data that a massive number of Filipinos want Sara impeached. A principled pollster would not push through with a survey if he finds that a majority of respondents do not know about the issue involved.
I suspect that SWS had thrown its professional ethics out the window as Stratbase most probably explained to it that the poll was necessary before Congress adjourned for the Christmas break in December. Indeed, the entire process was rushed, with the polling done from Dec. 12-18 and ADR Stratbase releasing it on Jan. 7. The SWS report itself said it was “Stratbase Consultancy” that prepared the poll on the impeachment complaint against Vice President Sara Duterte.
If the impeachment complaint would be voted on only in January this year, it risks being scuttled, as Congress would be busy with the May election. In this case, all of the Marcos-Romualdez gang’s energies and probably billions of funds that made the House undertake its persecution of Sara Duterte would be totally wasted.
Not read
Second, the questions the SWS asked its respondents to answer were most probably not even read at all. The question had 200 words, the Filipino version of which anybody would have to struggle through to read or be read by the pollster, with the respondent probably turning his mind off after the first 50 seconds of being interviewed.
Most of the questions were loaded and biased, a no-no for any legitimate pollster. These were worded in a way that presumed that Sara was guilty of crimes for which she could be accountable only through an impeachment trial. Among these are questions, believe it or not, involving extrajudicial killings in Davao when she was its mayor, ill-gotten wealth, travel to Germany during a major typhoon, failure to condemn China’s aggression in the West Philippine Sea, and threatening to kill President Marcos, his wife and Speaker Romualdez.”
Because of the complexity of the question — for example, many Filipinos would not even know where WPS is nor what a SALN or confidential funds are — it would have required hours of explanation by the pollster, who would have to report Sara’s side of these complaints. They didn’t, of course, as it took only six days for SWS pollsters to interview the 2,160 respondents.
Be critical, especially during this season: Not only will there be legitimate pollsters reporting fake news, but fake pollsters reporting fake news and so-called fact-checkers disseminating fake news.
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
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SWS survey report on Sara impeachment maliciously false
Source: Breaking News PH
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