Why most polls on GM labeling are meaningless

MSNBC posted a poll recently to determine whether or not people think GMOs should be labeled. The way the poll was constructed, however, tells me that they are either being intentionally dishonest, or they have no real understand of how polling works, and how to construct decent polling questions to get accurate results.

The question is:

Do you think GMO labeling should be mandatory?

The potential answers and their responses at the time of this posting are:

1

 

And….

2

 

Now, let’s unpack these a bit.

The first potential response is, of course, the misleading trope that the anti-GMO crowd has always used. It’s the “right to know” argument. I mean, don’t people have the right to know what’s in their food? We have a right to labels!

The second, of course, is saying that people would have to ask for information if they want it. Ask who?

You see, the anti-GMO crowd already has the option to know what’s in their food. There is voluntary non-GMO and Certified Organic labeling already in place. There’s even a series of smartphone apps that will tell you if something is non-GMO or not. This, of course, isn’t enough for the anti-GMO crowd.

That tells me something very important about their ideology. It’s a dishonest one. The right to know is absurd, since they already have that information. A GMO label would not give them any information they didn’t already have available to them. They want the label so they can point to it and claim it as a warning label. They don’t want the “right to know.” They want the elimination of the technology.

Read full, original article: Another Dishonest Poll on GMOs

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