Dog Bites Man. Sun Rises Again. Bush's Numbers Still Stink.

By Stuart Rothenberg

A new Newsweek poll says George W. Bush is unpopular. Very unpopular. The new Washington Post and ABC News survey says that George W. Bush is really, really unpopular. An even newer NBC and the Wall Street Journal poll says that the President is, well, truly, really, very unpopular. And not to be outdone, a hot-off-the-presses CNN poll says that the President is -- you guessed it -- quite, very, truly, without a doubt unpopular.

I'm all for polls, and with the President giving his State of the Union address this week, I certainly understand the rash of network polls to mark the occasion and the beginning of the end of the Bush administration.

But, the reality is that a poll isn’t particularly newsworthy just because it exits. Is there somebody out there who doesn’t know that the President is unpopular? And if there is, why would I want to meet that person?

I'm not sure that every media outlet and every college and university needs to conduct a poll. But even if they do, I don’t think we need to treat them as "breaking news." If polls started showing a dramatic change in opinion (in either direction, of course), now that would be news, and therefore worth reporting. But another poll showing the same thing isn’t worth a lot of time, except of course, by the media outlet paying for it.

So excuse me if I don’t linger over the latest poll number on President Bush. He's unpopular and every politician in the country knows that. That will certainly affect his influence with other elected officials and with the voters. But I really don't need ten different polls to tell me what we all already know.

This item first appeared on Political Wire on January 23, 2007.