Media-Blogger Alliance Helps Voters Turn Tables on Secretive Pollsters

Been polled? Colorado Confidential and Huffington Post’s OffTheBus want to know about it.
Now, you can finally exact revenge on long-winded pollsters who call at dinnertime and disingenuous push-polls that mangle your responses to fit their secret clients’ predetermined results.

Colorado Confidential’s parent organization, the Center for Independent Media, has teamed up with a bipartisan array of blogs, traditional media and online news networks for a first-ever national survey of political polls.

“Our aim is simple: to get a better understanding of how polling is being used across the country, said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post. We want to get to the bottom of how pollsters conduct their surveys, how they gather and build their stats, how they target who they contact, and, ultimately, how they reach their conclusions – conclusions that often fuel the very races they are supposed to be analyzing.”

Led by OffTheBus — a new media consortium of writers, photographers, video producers, campaign monitors, developers, researchers and fact-checkers — the Polling Project takes aim at the mysterious smoke-filled rooms of political polling.

Amanda Michel, project director of OffTheBus, remarked that it “is also a great example of what can happen when media organizations collaborate in working directly with the public.”

We couldn’t agree more.

HuffPost’s OffTheBus Polling Project is a crowd-sourced newsgathering effort of The Huffington Post and New Assignment.Net that taps the best of citizen journalism covering the 2008 presidential election.

In addition to the Center for Independent Media, sponsors include: BlogHer, Blue Hampshire, Concord Monitor, Instapundit, Mother Jones, My Silver State, The Nation, New West Notes, Open Left, Pajamas Media, Personal Democracy Forum, Politico, Pollster.com, Talking Points Memo, Winds of Change and WNYC.