Salon.com points out that nearly every major media outlet has completely ignored the fact that in every public opinion poll done in the past few weeks, Americans overwhelmingly support Michael Schiavo's right to make life-or-death decisions on his wife's behalf. Despite all their high-flung rhetoric, Republicans in Congress are ignoring that fully 87% of Americans (ABC News and Washington Post poll) would want their feeding tubes removed if they were in Terri Schiavo's condition.
Salon rightly points out that this incredible disregard for public opinion by politicians and the media is not simply another example of the crapiness of the modern corporate media, but shows just how far right the Republican leadership is and how far they're willing to go to impose their morality on the public, regardless of what the public wants.
Just as every judge who has heard the Schiavo case so far has ruled in Michael's favor, so has every poll taken shown that the majority of the public supports the husband's position. In survey after survey dating from 2003 to the present, asked who should have the final right-to-die decision, the majority of Americans have answered: the spouse. From national polls (e.g., ABC News/Washington Post, 65-25; and Fox News, 50-31) to statewide polls (e.g., KING-TV in Washington, 67-19; and St. Petersburg Times in Florida, 75-13) to unscientific, interactive polls (e.g., CNN, 65-26; and MSNBC, 63-37), the response has always been the same. A 2003 poll by CNN/USA Today had a similar result: Eighty percent agreed that a spouse should be allowed to decide whether to end the life of a person in a persistent vegetative state.
Salon.com (subscription or ad-watching required)
Even the outlets who sponsored the polls have suddenly stopped talking about them since the case became a political football.
The next morning, ABC's "Good Morning America" repeated the poll's finding. On March 17, however, as conservative Republicans in Congress announced that they would try to intervene on Terri's behalf by passing legislation, it became clear that the story was morphing from a legal and ethical one into a political one. That night ABC's "World News Tonight" covered the story, but suddenly any references to the network's own poll had disappeared. The next night the same program opened with three straight reports about the day's developments in the Schiavo story. But again, not once did anchor Peter Jennings or ABC reporters inform viewers that just a few days earlier 87 percent of Americans had said they would not want to go on living with a feeding tube if they were in Schiavo's condition, or that they sided with the husband in this saga by a margin of nearly 3-to-1.
