Bloggers Are Asked to Stop Disparaging Polling Company's Research
The operators of two popular blogs have received cease-and-desist letters from lawyers for a polling company whose data they have questioned.
The letters were sent to the politcal blog Daily Kos and to FiveThirtyEight, a blog that analyzes polling data, on behalf of Reseach 2000, a widely used polling company, the New York Times reported Wednesday.
According to the Times, the letters asked the two blog operators to stop discrediting the polling company’s results.
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the founder of Daily Kos, said in a post Tuesday that an analysis of polling data provided to the blog by Research 2000 showed “quite convincingly” that the data was “likely bunk.”
That analysis, published on Daily Kos, described “extreme anomalies” in the research done by the polling company and concluded that the results did not accurately reflect random polls.
Zuniga, whose blog has published a weekly poll by Research 2000 since January 2009, is planning to sue the company for breach of contract and misrepresentation, the Times says.
Nate Silver, who runs FiveThirtyEight, has also rated the polling company poorly on his site.
