Our pollsters have become cheap, shameless propagandists

SHAME on them — and I refer mainly to Social Weather Stations and the newbie OCTA Research. They fool the nation by pretending to use the modern social science tools of statistics and survey research. These tools gather the views of a sample, typically 1,200 people, which are taken to represent the opinion of the entire population.

But their surveys are so flawed that real pollsters would be shocked.

They ask questions about issues the respondents do not fully understand, and these questions are formulated in ways that lead to responses favoring the propaganda goals they want to achieve.

I have written two columns on the flawed surveys of these two pollsters, intended as propaganda material to falsely portray that Filipinos want Vice President Sara Duterte impeached. (“Filipinos not interested in Sara trial; only fake polls claim they want it,” June 20, and “Fake: SWS-Stratbase poll that Filipinos support impeachment,” June 4, 2025.) They have not replied at all.

That these two flawed polls were released within a month’s time — one commissioned by the shadowy anti-China Stratbase outfit — points to a propaganda blitz undertaken by the Marcos-Romualdez cabal that wants the Dutertes, the only obstacle to their greed for power, buried 10 feet underground.

This time around, OCTA Research released the other day, its flawed poll, reported without question by most newspapers, although only this paper bannered it with the headline: “Most Filipinos back return to ICC – poll.”

OCTA is apparently so worried that the fallacy of its poll would be easily exposed that, contrary to the practice of professional pollsters, it did not even make public the actual question it asked. We therefore have to assume it employed its usual style of asking just one question, which in this case would be, “Do you approve of calls for the Philippines to rejoin the International Criminal Court?”

Any legitimate pollster, or just one who has studied the nature of opinion polls, would immediately see the flaws in such a question.

Flaw

The big flaw is that not many people really understand what the “International Criminal Court (ICC)” is, and as many studies show, respondents tend to pretend — out of pride — to have knowledge of what they are being asked about. For instance, not even many columnists know the difference between the ICC and the International Court of Justice.

The reality is that most people do not even actively research or analyze burning issues gripping the country, and rely on their views from chance conversations or occasionally reading newspaper columns or hearing broadcast commentaries. Jose Dalisay, a literati who writes a column twice a week at the Philippine Star, explained this very common way, even for an intellectual like him, of acquiring a stance on issues in his entertaining way:

“Unlike many newspaper columnists, I don’t have much of a political or business network, being a not-very-sociable recluse who prefers to play poker with a few regulars and go out on dinner dates with my wife than clink glasses with the cognoscenti.

“But every now and then I get a seat at the table with people who seem to truly know what is going on — political operatives and operators with the inside track on where people really stand and who’s in bed with whom, and bankers who find themselves serving as confessors to clients pouring out their tales of woe.”

He then relates his latest “powwow with a group of eminently connected friends,” whose views that Sara “is as guilty as hell” he reports in his column without discussing if this would be accurate or not. He is unconcerned that I bet many gullible readers will believe his condemnation of the vice president. After all, he is a columnist.

Columnists

Indeed, in this country, the manufacture of views largely involves columnists, broadcast commentators and – thank God! – social media commentators picking up some view from a group (also by PR operators) and disseminating it without analysis, to be quoted by other groups of people, even by senators who announce them in their privilege speeches.

Scrupulous pollsters try to correct that crucial flaw that respondents do not really know what they are being asked their opinion about by prefacing their questions with many explanations about the issue.

This is important because public opinion can flip dramatically depending on how a question is worded or whether background information is provided. Unscrupulous pollsters usually do not do this, as it will take more time for the field researcher to complete the survey — which means increasing the poll owners’ costs and, of course, reducing their profits.

This has been pointed out by many analysts with regard to polls on the US burning issue of the day, President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a hodgepodge of sweeping reforms involving tax cuts, Medicaid coverage, and unstructured reform.

Poll

For instance, an actual poll by the KFF Health Tracking Poll asked: “Do you favor or oppose requiring most Medicaid recipients to work in order to keep their health coverage?” The result was that 47 percent favored it and 46 percent opposed that provision of the bill.

However, when a follow-up question was asked — “Knowing that adult Medicaid enrollees are unable to work due to illness or caregiving, would you still favor or oppose this work requirement?” — the results shifted sharply, with only 27 percent favoring it and 64 percent opposing it.

On OCTA’s ICC survey, a huge majority would oppose the Philippines rejoining the ICC if the question was prefaced by the following statements:

“The ICC’s arrest of President Duterte is the first time this institution has incarcerated a former president elected by 16 million votes, 39 percent of the voters, on charges involving a domestic policy — the war on drugs. The rules of court and evidence in the ICC do not allow the witnesses’ cross-examination (and even identification), and the evidence is not examined by the defense.

“Partly because of the ICC’s loose standards for convicting an accused and its gross violation of countries’ sovereignty, the United States — purportedly the world’s champion of the rule of law — has left the ICC, with US President Trump saying that the ICC has no jurisdiction, no legitimacy, and no authority over individuals of other sovereign states.

Trump has even banned ICC personnel from entering the US and frozen the US assets of four ICC judges. Russia and China — the two superpowers viewed as rivals of the US — have never joined the ICC, seeing it as a neocolonial institution mainly set up by European countries. After 23 years and spending the equivalent of P188 billion, the ICC has so far convicted only 11 dark-skinned individuals, all from sub-Saharan nations, and mostly warlords of the different factions in the civil wars in those countries.

Trillanes

It was former senator Trillanes and his obscure lawyer Jude Sabio who first filed the ICC case in 2017. Sabio withdrew his complaint in 2020, claiming that it was mere “political propaganda” by opposition figures, including former senator Leila de Lima, and that Trillanes had not paid his lawyer’s fees.

Fronts of the Communist Party — partly because Duterte nearly obliterated it during his term, and partly because of financial gain — have been the operators behind the case, with its cadre allegedly of central committee rank, even embedded in the ICC as “assistant counsel.”

Many have concluded that the Marcos-Romualdez clan has provided the huge resources for this plot. This is obvious in that the police official of director rank, Nicolas Torre, who forced the former president onto the plane that brought him to the ICC jail, was appointed by Marcos as chief of the Philippine National Police, jumping over the heads of 11 more senior generals who outranked him.

Too long? Of course. Since it would take so many sentences to brief a respondent on the issue he is being asked to reply to. If it’s impossible to do that, then don’t undertake such a survey, which would be merely propaganda disguised as an opinion poll.

These two pollsters have taken advantage of most people’s confusion that there is nothing different between polls asking people’s opinion on an issue and those asking whom they will vote for in coming elections.

In the first type of poll, it is irrelevant why a respondent voted for this or that candidate. The pollster’s goal is to have a sense of the likely winners at a period of time, so his candidate-client could adjust his tactics. In the second type of poll, we need to be sure the respondents know the issue they are being asked to respond to, if we want an accurate picture.

But as conducted by SWS and OCTA, they do not care about this, as their goal, in their recent polls, is solely to falsely portray Filipinos as favoring impeachment and rejoining the ICC in order to fool Congress that they will be going against people’s sentiments if they do not heed their fake polls’ findings.

These two pollsters have turned that adage “Vox populi, vox Dei” into “Vox fraudatorum, vox Dei.”

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Our pollsters have become cheap, shameless propagandists
Source: Breaking News PH