CNN: Poll vs. Spin

Buried way, way down at the bottom of the story - hopefully, one surmises, past the point where anyone would read - is the following:

The results may be favoring Obama simply because more Democrats than Republicans tuned in to the debate. Of the debate-watchers questioned in this poll, 41 percent of the respondents identified themselves as Democrats, 27 percent as Republicans and 30 percent as independents.

I'm far from being a polling expert, but this is obviously a slanted poll. A 14-point split between Republican and Democrat respondents? And what percentage of those "independents" were leaners for Obama?

That's bad enough, but the really egregious part is CNN's blatant reportage of opinion as fact, which allowed the creation of a news story announcing Obama's victory.

"It can be reasonably concluded, especially after accounting for the slight Democratic bias in the survey, that we witnessed a tie in Mississippi tonight," CNN Senior Political Researcher Alan Silverleib said. "But given the direction of the campaign over the last couple of weeks, a tie translates to a win for Obama."