While our focus on this special Talking Points Memo segment has naturally been on election polls, another area of concern is public policy polls. Typically, media polls are designed not to report public opinion but to manufacture a "public opinion" that is interesting and plausible for the news stories - often at the expense of anything that resembles what Americans are really thinking.

The major tactics media pollsters use are 1) asking forced choice questions, to get answers even from people who have no opinion; 2) providing information to respondents in the interview, in case they don't know enough already to offer an opinion - and in so doing taint the sample, so that it no longer represents the general public that has not been given that same information; and 3) failing to provide meaningful intensity measures that could help distinguish firmly held views from the "top-of-mind" views that respondents express in the press of a quick telephone interview.

Typically, the news media do not want to report polls that show a significant segment of the public unengaged and without an opinion on an issue. So pollsters "force" (pressure) respondents to come up with an answer, no matter how lightly held. And if respondents don't know enough, pollsters provide them some limited information.

The net result is that often media poll results conflict greatly with each other, because different polls give different information to respondents, and thus influence them to give different answers. That was the case recently with polls that asked people their reactions to the efforts by Congress and the President to address the economic crisis.

On Sept. 23, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll reported that Americans opposed the congressional bailout plan by a 24-point margin, 55 percent to 31 percent. That story was cited frequently on various television and radio shows as evidence that Americans were "angry" about the bailout. However, the very same day, a Pew Research poll, conducted over the same time period as the Times/Bloomberg poll, found that Americans supported the Wall Street bailout by a 27-point margin, 57 percent to 30 percent.

In both cases, the polls provided biased information to the respondents, by characterizing the government plan and the situation. The "truth" is almost certainly that a large segment of the population was conflicted over the efforts and could not say for sure if they favored or opposed the plan. But the pollsters did not measure uncertainty, and instead asked biased questions that prompted respondents to give an answer.

A third poll by Washington Post/ABC News, also released on Sept. 23 and conducted over the same time period as the other two polls, found an evenly divided public, 44 percent in favor to 42 percent opposed.

Thus, three different polls on the same subject, all conducted at the same time, with three very different reports.

This is not an unusual situation. Recently, different polls reported contradictory "public opinions" on whether people favored off-shore oil drilling, though oddly very few people were reported without an opinion. In The Opinion Makers, I cite several examples in 2007, showing how public policy polls came to quite contradictory conclusions about the public's support for S-CHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program), for cutting off funding for the war in Iraq, and for Congress to pass a resolution opposing President Bush's troop surge. In those cases, different polls provided different information to the respondents and used forced-choice questions to extract an answer. It's not surprising the polls contradicted each other.

The polls can do better than this. But pollsters and the media have to be willing to 1) ask neutral questions, 2) provide no information about the issue, 3) allow respondents an explicit "don't know" response, and 4) follow-up with a meaningful intensity question. This process will reveal that on most issues, a substantial segment of Americans, probably from 40 percent to 60 percent, are unengaged and have no firmly held opinion. That, unfortunately, is the truth about American democracy, which media polls routinely hide.

Although there is not room here to elaborate at this time, in my book I suggest that this routine distortion of American public opinion undermines the democratic process.