In Missouri v Simmons Justice Scalia scolded the majority for, among other things, looking for authority to polls and studies that had never been presented in court and tested by the adversarial process and whose authors had not been tested through cross-examination. In the April fourth issue, The Weekly Standard editors draw back the curtain on just how dishonest polls and "studies" can be:


The Weekly Standard
From the April 4, 2005 issue
by The Scrapbook
04/04/2005, Volume 010, Issue 27

Peee-ew
Back in March 2004, former Pew Charitable Trusts program officer Sean Treglia attended a conference at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. Treglia must have felt gabby, because he launched into a long, discursive tale of how his former employers at Pew had used tens of millions of dollars to simulate a wave of popular support for campaign finance reform.
"I'm going to tell you a story that I've never told any reporter," Treglia crowed. He probably assumed his anecdotes would stay between him and his sympathetic audience. But Treglia was being videotaped, and the videotape fell into the hands of Ryan Sager, an intrepid polemicist for the New York Post. Last week Sager posted a partial transcript of the speech on the Post's website (www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/transcript0.htm). Here's Treglia:
We wanted to expand the voices calling for reform to include the business community, to include minority organizations, and to include religious groups, to counter the Christian Coalition. The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington [the U.S. Congress]. The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot. That everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform . . .
Over seven years, I spent about $30 million of Pew money on this effort. And the money led directly to key elements of the McCain-Feingold legislation: the ban on soft-money, the issue-advocacy provision, the better disclosure and the stand-by-your-ad. .

. . We funded the business community, minority groups, religious groups.
No worries, Treglia went on. "We did everything by the letter of the law." Except "we just never released press releases saying that we were funding these grants at the time." The strategy was a stunning success. "If you look at the Supreme Court decision, you will see that almost half of the footnotes relied on by the Supreme Court in upholding [McCain-Feingold] are research funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts"--some of which research, incidentally, was horribly flawed, as David Tell pointed out in these pages two years ago ("An Appearance of Corruption," May 26, 2003).
No matter. "If any reporter wanted to know" about the connections between Pew and its grant recipients, Treglia explained--like the nexus Tell pointed to with New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice--"they could have sat down and connected the dots. But they didn't."
Maybe that's because some of the organizations those reporters work for were taking Pew's money, too. Sager points us to "Campaign Finance Reform Lobby, 1994-2004," a recently released report by Political Money Line, which details how in the last decade eight pro-reform, typically left-leaning foundations spent over $123 million to lobby for changes to campaign finance law. Not all that money went to business, minority, and religious groups. Since 1994, for example, National Public Radio has accepted over $1.2 million from pro-campaign-finance-reform foundations. According to "official disclosure statements," Sager reports, the funds were earmarked for "news coverage of financial influence in political decision-making," including original programming such as the show "Money, Power and Influence." The Scrapbook missed that program, but we can guess what angle it took.