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CNN’s response to this incident:
CNN didn’t edit out the question from Drew Griffin for editorial reasons. Sometimes we edit clips to a certain length because shorter clips tend to do better online. Drew was questioning a CNN correspondent and not a guest. If it were a guest or person who did the study, we would have certainly posted the segment in its entirety. The full segment is now streaming.
This video by RonMattieu is up on YouTube. It’s a TV screencap of a report by Barbara Starr about the survey sent out today by the Pentagon related to implementation of DADT repeal to 200,000 active duty troops and 200,000 reserve troops.
CNN’s Barbara Starr defends polling soldiers if they want to shower with “open” gays. Listen carefully as anchor Drew Griffin challenges her and she becomes quite defensive in justifying the ‘survey’. Truly despicable. The exchange starts around 2:20.
Here is part of the Starr’s report as it appears on the CNN web site, and she repeats almost verbatim in the video.
An administration official confirmed to CNN that the survey is being sent to 200,000 active duty troops and 200,000 reserve troops. The official declined to be identified because the survey has not officially been made public.The survey, which service members can expect to receive via e-mail, asks about such issues as how unit morale or readiness might be affected if a commander is believed to be gay or lesbian; the need to maintain personal standards of conduct; and how repeal might affect willingness to serve in the military.
The survey also asks a number of questions aimed at identifying problems that could occur when troops live and work in close quarters in overseas war zones. For example, the questionnaire asks military members how they would react if they had to share a room, bathrooms, and open-bay showers in a war zone with other service members believed to be gay or lesbian.
At the end of her report, Drew Griffin seems perturbed at the idea of the whole survey idea, and asks:
Why do they care — these joint chiefs — these guys are paid to make decisions. Why are they sending out this public relations survey asking whoever wants to respond to this and supposedly going to use this to make a decision on this?
Starr is a little taken aback and responds with
“You’re right this is a terrific question because there is a lot of confusion about it because we all know that in the military once the Commander in Chief give an order, salute smartly and carry on. That’s the way life goes in the military, you really don’t get a vote on what orders you want to follow.”
She continues on to talk about the political “delicate nature” of the situation, how the President really wants repeal but well, to paraphrase broadly — they want to make sure these 200,000 active duty troops and 200,000 reserve troops aren’t worried about the soap dropping in the shower.
Now what’s weird is that the video on CNN’s web site (below) obviously edits out that exchange between Griffn and Starr at 2:26 – 4:39 in the above video.
Why? There’s no real reason to do so, as it’s a web clip, so time constraints aren’t relevant. What editorial judgment was made that Griffin’s interest in a logical reason for the survey is not newsworthy to readers of CNN’s web site?
33 Comments
Great question by Drew GriffinJust to clarify, the part that CNN edited out starts at 2:26 (not 2:53). They carefully excised the portion in which Drew Griffin sounded dumbfounded at why the Pentagon would be polling the troops when they are supposed to follow orders. He perfectly expressed how it seems ludicrous. Sadly, by the end of the clip he is actually backtracking and apologizing to Barbara Starr.
The most interesting part of the segment was the part they excisedYou can see the edit mark in the CNN’s own clip at 2:20 (the time is visible if you hold your cursor over the progress bar below the video).
My mistake …Sorry, the CNN edit (on their own clip, not the Youtube clip) happens at 2:10 (not 2:20).
Saw this livethis afternoon. I haven’t checked the edited version. When I saw this story, no one else had it at the time. I searched and searched….Typical crap.
Starr doesn’t know a damn thing about statistics. Griffin’s second question was equally on target.There is no guarantee of statistical validity unless they get a very, very high rate of response, and even then there are a number of troubling issues surrounding this survey – confidentiality, the perception of the troops that they are expected to answer one way or the other – that may well skew the results. Furthermore, I have no trust that the Pentagon won’t just change the answers to match their desired results.
The whole thing is incredibly offensive. How much did it cost to send out this unprecedented survey asking troops how they feel about a policy? 100 questions giving validity to every possible homophobic stereotype? Asking troops how they would feel – would they have to talk to their chaplain?! – if they saw a gay person in the shower? When they’re getting their limbs blown to pieces, watching people die, serving in a war zone for a decade? And the worst possible thing that might happen is gays in the shower? It’s obscene.
Obscene is the only word for it.
McCain is behind this surveyIn my opinion, this whole charade is just a variation of what Sam Nunn did with the film crews down in submarine bunks and shower stalls. I guess to do that again would appear flagrantly biased and homophobic. So this time they are trying to do the same thing under the radar. McCain and his gang are trying to inflame the same anger and violence towards gays by asking about “sharing toilets” and “sharing showers”. Since it was our money used to design the ‘survey’, I demand an INVESTIGATION into WHO CRAFTED THESE SPECIFIC QUESTIONS AND WHY!
Carefully worded to be against repealSeems to me asking “would showering in an open stall shower on a battlefield with openly gay individuals upset you” would get a different response than “do you want to shower with openly gay individuals?”
SCREAM!!!!!!!!!
I’m often accused of being too strident, too cyncial about this OBAMA-EMPOWERED CHARADE and I don’t care!
I have been saying from the moment President Gates, excuse me, SECDEF Gates announced this that it had been conceived of and would be executed to try to “fix” the results in such a way to scare Congress out of repeal…and, now, as the result of Congress having been forced at the last minute in May by Obama to trash the REAL “end of discharges” bill, the Military Readiness Enhancement Act, to give him/Gates an excuse to say to Congress, “Well, you said we should ask Pvt. Tater, Mrs. Tater, and the Tater tots what they thought about letting The Fagroes out of their camo closets. We did, spent millions of taxpayer dollars doing it, and they said, ‘HELL NO!!!!’ So we’re weally, weally sorry, and this hurts us more than it does The Fagroes, but we just can’t end the ban at this time.”
And this is just more proof that they’ve constructed it to generate “self-fulfilling prophecy” answers….just short of explicitly asking something like, “Are you afraid you’ll be raped in the showers?”
“Over one hundred questions” sent to 400,000 troops???? AGAIN, casting the widest possible net to maximize getting the largest number of negative answers. Hell, I bet if they’d asked Mary over 100 questions about Jesus she would have thought of some negative answers. “Let me think. Here’s one: He uses His halo to read comic books in bed!”
Well, y’all, I return to my original question, and it won’t cost taxpayers a cent:
Where is SLDN or Servicemembers United?
They haven’t even issued any comments. I want them to demand transparency and determine how the Pentagon will get the voice of the 66,000 LGBT active duty servicemembers, their partners and their influencers. I also want to know if the Pentagon will be doing a troop survey to determine how they feel about the war in Afghanistan.
The intentional manipulation of this video clip proves our opponents have very powerful tentacles and want us to remain silent.
news from SLDNWill be forthcoming — and a full release will go live at 9AM. I will have news on it earlier.
The whole scam ‘survey’ stinksJust wait until we see the real word-for-word questions. I wouldn’t be surprised if they use the term “homosexual” instead of gay and lesbian. Dear God I hope some journalist is able to go behind the scenes and uncover who worded the survey and what their agenda was. Another crucial key is how they used the factors they mentioned to choose survey recipients. 400,000 individual troops were selected (NOT AT RANDOM!). How they were selected can very easily had another layer of homophobic bias.
Oh the irony!Army General Carter F. Ham (heading the review panel assessing the current law) comments on the process of the DADT study: “It is vitally important that servicemembers continue to be open and frank and totally honest with us in their feedback.”
OK, does this guy even realize how absurd his remark is – considering the gay and lesbian service members are FORCIBLY DISCHARGED if they are in any way “open and frank”?
Source: http://lezgetreal.com/2010/07/…
i cant beleive….ENDA got curbied for this tom foolery. im not surprised about the bathroom question, afterall its their fav. play, but 2 ask them if they’d respect orders from a gay guy?!
thats all im gonna say, cuz i cant say anything nice, but i hope someone finds and posts the questions, so we can all lol @ their phobic jive somewere down the line.
It is outraegeously offensive enough that this survey is being used on ANY level to encourage justification of the most venomous, manufactured discrimination that can only come from the Far Right, but the utter disrespect it has for the troops themselves is an abomination.
Is someone going to be uncomfortable taking a shower with a gay person? WTF? Did none of these people ever take a required physical education course segregated by gender in a public or private school? They’ve already taken showers with gay people for years in civilian life – and they suddenly need to be asked if they get the heebie-jeebies because some gay person might be trying to clean him or herself in the same showers as an adult? Do none of these people even have a basic gym membership?
Others have rightly commented on how biased these survey questions appear to be – and I’m not surprised at all. The whole scheme smelled of a massive charade from the start.
I suggest the Obama Administration start sending surveys to 30 million gay Americans about how WE feel about forking over more than half of every tax dollar to a military that isn’t doing a damn thing to protect OUR liberty and constitutional rights. It is increasingly looking like nothing more than a giant welfare system for heterosexuals (like the rising number of special “marriage” rights laws for straights) that demands the rest of us foot the bill – with little hope of participation in either serving our nation or receiving any benefits and no voice in any of the process.
It is just a variation on Nunn’s tactics….
BUT, it’s not being driven by McCain. It was clearly President Gates’, excuse me, SECDEF Gates’ idea, backed up by Obama apparently even BEFORE he took office.
MARCH 2, 2010, Gates memor to service chiefs:
MARCH 25, 2010, DOD news conference:
April 30, 2010, White House statement backing up open letter from Gates & Mullen agreeing with Cong. Skelton that no vote of any kind should happen before “the study” was done:
The buck stops on the President’s desk!
Barbara Starr an experienced journalist?What is so stunning is that Barbara Starr is CNN’s official Pentagon reporter. Yet listen carefully at just one of her remarks: “Would you use a shower facility in an open bay area if you thought there were service members in there that are gay and lesbian?”
Notice that she doesn’t even understand the most basic elements of DADT. There are already gay and lesbian soldiers in the showers. Yet she somehow imagines a danger if someone even “thinks” they might be in there. She doesn’t even distinguish between openly gay and closeted. This reveals how truly ignorant some of these ‘reporters’ are concerning how dehumanizing this whole charade is to glbt people.
Maybe the poll should have asked:Instead of just “Would you want to shower with open gays,”
“Would you like to keep worrying if you’re showering with closeted gays?”
It’s toe-tappin-errr-iffic!
That is all. :)
You call that being defensive???She just reporting the Pentagon rationale, nothing more, nothing less.
And Drew Griffin’s question about sampling is not very well thought out, since if you can survey 100% of the population, you have the best possible sample that could exist. Surveys are great for being cheap and easy and getting lots and lots of data, but everyone knows that the respondents who are pissed reply at a much higher rate than any others, followed by the respondents who are happy, and the vast majority in the middle don’t even bother.
Here’s the thingShe’s saying what the survey is asking, not what she thinks about DADT. Blaming the messenger ain’t gonna help.
Cost?The survey is being done online. The cost to sample 400,000 is exactly the same as surveying the complete military population of 3,000,000 or whatever.
Then the survey is worthlessIf the survey asks the question she posed, then it doesn’t even make any sense. If a person is concerned that there might be a gay person in the showers, they have already been operating in that condition forever. Look at how she posed the question. Repealing DADT is supposed to be about allowing gay and lesbian soldiers to be honest. That has nothing to do with a straight soldier suspecting that a gay might be in the shower. That’s the exact situation ALREADY. So is the survey supposed to remedy their fears right now (even before repeal)? And how would they do that?
Ralph…
While the entire idea is indefensible, it’s a little more complicated than simply clicking “Send.” They had to write the questions, identify which 400,000 they were going to be sent to, sort the answers, etc., etc.
Sorry, you know nothing about survey methodology…
See Gallup org comment above re the number surveyed and margins of error.
LOL, exactly!
Soldiers are a captive audience. There is no additional cost to add 1,000,000 to survey.“those selected were chosen based upon a variety of factors including age, rank, service, component, military specialty, education, marital status and a few other factors”
How can this be more effective than a random sampling? The key is: how did they manipulate the selection criteria in choosing the survey recipients. Anyone familiar with statistics knows that sample selecting for certain characteristics can drastically affect any results. Either the news reports about the survey are totally inaccurate, or else Westat is a bunch of Right-Wing hacks.
STAT101Gallup was commenting about their use of random sampling. The Pentagon is NOT using random sampling. The mathematical models are TOTALLY different when not using random sampling. I cannot emphasize enough how different the curves and modeling are when on uses mystery selection techniques like Westat is doing. Nate Silver is going to have a field day with this travesty (if they ever release the raw data).
Bizzare!If these troops have been in contact militarily with those from my own country in the last twenty years, then they have been working with open gays and lesbians- it’s been close to two decades since anti-homosexual policies were scrapped in Australia. Anyway isn’t this all a bit patronising to service people? I mean if they can’t cope with a few gays and lesbians, how the hell are they going to cope with battle conditions? Surely American soldiers are not that fragile?
Nice: The Nazis, Skinheads and Waivered in Ex-ConsGet to voice and opinion on LGBTs in the military while the LGBTs are silenced due to the method of data collection. Sweet Jeebus.
you know what……FUCK AMERICA! I’ve lost ALL repsect for anything this country does or says anymore….at 49yrs old…I’ve had it. Fuck the GOP and the Dems…they are ALL Liars..and Obama included.
Look, I’m not trying to defend the survey, quite the opposite….
My point is that attacking the methodology without attacking the homophobic ideology behind the survey first simply signals, “Oh, we’d be FINE with your building this on the ASSUMPTION that gays will be a problem; it’s just that you have to do it the right way.”
And it is randomized by categories of people, e.g., poll privates, poll personnel workers, poll 19-25 yr. olds, etc.
IN ANY CASE, it is the very idea of the study that should be uncompromisingly denounced…as Gay, Inc., SHOULD have done back in February but, instead, rolled over and now EVERYTHING, just as President Gates intended, pivots around the study…as day after day more and more are discharged.
Note, none of our criticism at this point will STOP it, but discrediting it IS good.
Taken abackI can see why “Starr is a little taken aback…” Griffin seems to think that this survey has something to do with whether DADT is repealed, which it doesn’t. Repeal of DADT is a given. The purpose of the survey is to find what problems might arise due to the perceptions some in the service might have about gays because of the nonsense spewed forth by anti-gay groups. What do service members who were raised in the Southern Baptist tradition have to say about it, for example.
They can then take action to forestall the negative effects of these false beliefs beforehand. Statistical reliability is irrelevant. If those with opposing views are more likely to respond, then so much the better. These are just the views the survey is designed to ferret out. Handling these mis-perceptions effectively will make having openly gay service members go more smoothly.
Not true!Earlier today, Gates emphasized why he thinks the survey will help determine “when and IF” DADT is repealed. The whole idea and purpose of having a ‘survey’ was created by Right-Wingers to stir up anti-gay fears, hatred, and violence. So far their plan is working perfectly.
Here is Gates at today’s press conference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…