Polls as Infotainment: do you trust Putin?

Now we know 80% of Germans don't trust Russia. That's according to a big, splashy headline in one of Germany's mainstay newspapers.

The biggest problem upfront: the article conflates Russia and the government of Mr, Putin.

The K-Landnews reading of this poll result is that Germans are less crazy than our very own TheEditor@K-Landnews sometimes pretends they are, especially since almost half of those polled understand that Russia might feel threatened by the West.

The media reading of the result is different: see, the vast majority of Germans are for sanctions and, deep down, really for any means necessary to counter Russian aggression.

Russian aggression is the term the paper touting the poll uses. At the risk of being put into a pro-Putin or pro-Russian corner - we don't do corners - may we remind everybody that trust is not a good concept to measure politics.

Would you agree?

If not, well, you see, not long ago many Germans trusted a guy named Hitler, I mean, really trusted him.

The result?

Yes, indeed. So, what is the purpose of polls questions like do you trust Putin? A charitable answer would be to figure out the sentiment of the population and make better policies. What would a better policy taking into account an 80% distrust level look like?

It gets very murky, the blogster feels, so we won't go down that path.

We should be wary of the SurveyMonkey meets international politics approach to polling, not just in this instance but across the board. Employee satisfaction and trust in Putin are not as far apart as one might think, question wise.

Measuring sentiment via polls or surveys is by no means futile, but beware of intentions to move you into accepting a policy or an action based on it.

After all, the German infotainment polls has an approval rating of 12% for Russia and its government, which is a mere 3 points under the average approval rating of the US Congress in 2014.