Who's paying for these polls?

The Recess Supervisor wants to know who's paying for these Strategic Vision polls that keep telling us how popular Tommy Thompson is? That's a very good question.

The Journal Sentinel's Steve Walters, who wrote about it, doesn't know or care. "The polling company did not identify the sponsor of the poll," Walters wrote. You can't tell from that whether he bothered to call and ask and they refused to tell, or if he just didn't notice a sponsor listed.

In the past, it seems to me, Strategic Vision claimed it didn't have a sponsor, that it was doing polls on its own to try to drum up some business. I'm very skeptical of that, and the news media should be, too.

In fact, responsible journalism would refuse to run those stories without disclosure. And it's not just me who says that.

The National Committee on Published Polls lists the minimum info that a newspaper shouold disclose when writing about polls. Numero Uno is the identity of the survey's sponsor.

The National Council on Public Polling offers 20 questions a journalist should ask about a poll. Number 2 is "who paid for the poll?"

"The sponsor of the survey should always be revealed," says Edison Research.

And the American Assn. of Public Opinion Research -- the pollsters' own organization -- has a code of ethics that calls for disclosure of the sponsor when a poll is made public.

If Wisconsin's news media are going to report on every poll someone slips them -- which seems to be the case -- and treat them all as equally important and reliable, their minimal obligation is to ask who's paying the bill.