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The Buffalo News Pimps the Casino

On Monday, July 3, Buffalo News staff reporter Sharon Linstedt typed up another in her ongoing series of press releases for the Seneca Gaming Corporation. (On June 1, Linstedt transcribed a press release hailing the SGC’s “cutting-edge design” for its downtown Buffalo “gambling campus”—never bothering to suggest that the plan was really just a drawing, or to ask why the SGC’s drawing required the city to cede Fulton Street, or to talk to people who might think the plan was not as great as the press release she was cribbing from said it was.)

Monday’s press-release-generated article was about a poll conducted by Zogby International, commissioned by the SGC to plumb the depths of Buffalo’s support for a downtown casino. Or, in any case, to dig up some popular support for the project.

The article was titled “A majority supports plan for a casino, poll shows” and it ran on page B1. Don’t bother to look for it online; it’s been pulled from the Buffalo News Web site. It’s not even archived with Lexis Nexus. I don’t know why, but I’ll hazard a guess: The editors at the News realized it was trash journalism and hoped to sweep Linstedt’s mess under the rug.

First, let’s look at what Linstedt’s story and the press release say:

The Zogby poll comprises 12 questions, which the pollsters asked of 903 likely voters within the City of Buffalo by telephone over a two-day period in late June. The first two questions are warmups—How do you feel about Mayor Byron Brown? How do you feel about Buffalo’s Common Council?—and no doubt were designed to aid in determining whether or not the respondents qualified as likely voters. (Which is itself a tricky business. Most people identify themselves as likely voters but most people don’t, in fact, vote. But that doesn’t merit lengthy discussion here.) Brown should be pleased; he was veiwed favorably by 74.3 percent of the respondents. The Common Council fared much worse—35.9 percent positive, 36.1 percent negative and the rest indifferent or not tuned in enough to have an opinion.

The next question is likewise not germane to the issue of gambling and casinos in downtown Buffalo: The pollsters asked respondents how they felt generally about the Seneca Nation of Indians. What that has to do with whether a casino is a good way to build a city’s economy is anyone’s guess, but the Senecas should be pleased as well: They rated a favorable impression among 55.3 percent of respondents.

The next two questions are “Do you favor or oppose casino gambling in New York State?” and “Do you favor or oppose casino gambling in downtown Buffalo?”

Nothing wrong with those questions—they’re straightforward and unbiased. Their only shortcoming is that they assume the respondents have the information they need to make a judgment. That’s an iffy assumption in a town whose only daily newspaper rehashes press releases from the Seneca Gaming Corporation and calls it news, and where the SGC has been flooding the airwaves for a month with happy advertisements promising a future filled with lots of new jobs and economic prosperity for everyone. Awash in that propaganda, 61.7 percent of the respondents favor gambling in New York State and 57.9 percent favor gambling in downtown Buffalo.

Those are the last questions that don’t lead the respondent to a conclusion. Now the questions start turning problematic. Let’s look at them:

9. Construction is beginning for the Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino on a nine acre parcel in the downtown area at Perry and Fulton Streets (the old First Ward area) purchased by the Seneca Nation of Indians. Do you favor or oppose building the Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino in that downtown area?

Actually, deconstruction is all that’s going on at the nine-acre parcel the Senecas own dowtown. They’ve demolished the H-O Oats grain elevator. Nothing has been built yet. Suggesting that construction has already begun influences the respondent’s answer; the respondent, if he or she doesn’t have a strong opinion on the siting of a casino, is liable to say, “Sure, if it’s already happening, why not?” The question assumes that the downtown casino is a done deal—it sells the idea that the project is already underway. It’s not. Nothing has been built and two lawsuits, one in state court and one in federal court, aim to prevent anything from being built.

The questions become more leading:

10. If you knew that building the Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino would bring in 1000 jobs, would that make you…to support building the casino?

11. If you knew that building the Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino in downtown Buffalo would potentially mean an additional $5 million to $7 million in city revenue, would that make you...to support building the casino?

Well now, there it is; if Question #9 left any doubt, Questions #10 and #11 remove it. Zogby’s questionnaire officially has just become what’s known as a “push poll.” That’s a political trick whereby pollsters use a bogus survey to disseminate a message and influence the way the respondent thinks of a person or thing. The most famous recent iteration happened in 2000, during the Republican presidential primary, when Texas Governor George W. Bush was losing ground to Arizona Senator John McCain. Likely Republican voters in the critical state of South Carolina were called up on the phone and told, “We’re taking a poll. Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for Senator John McCain if you learned he had fathered an illegitimate child with a young black woman?”

The pollsters didn’t care what the answer was. They just wanted to plant the seed of an idea in the minds of white Southern Republicans: McCain might not be our kind of guy.

These two questions in the Zogby poll serve a similar function. They present these two speculative futures as unchallenged facts: A casino means 1,000 new jobs and $5 million to $7 million a year in revenue for the city. You don’t get to argue with the pollster; you don’t get to say, “Well, what about the casino’s effect on the businesses that surround it? What about its effect on the city’s tax base? How much will it cost the city to provide services to the casino? What about the cost to society of problem gamblers? What about bankruptcy and embezzlement? How does this affect the waterfront development plan that’s finally been funded? Isn’t this issue a little more complicated? Can I hear some of the potential downsides before I answer your question?”

No negatives allowed—only unchallenged positives: $7 million and 1,000 jobs. Who’s going to say no to that? Zogby may as well have asked, “If you were guaranteed to win at least one mind-boggling jackpot every time you visited the Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino, would you be more likely to support it?”

Of course you would say yes. But there are no such guarantees. Those 1,000 jobs and $7 million in city revenue are speculative and ignore all the negative realities that attend a casino’s host community—including lost jobs, lost city revenues and new city expenses that offset those speculative positives. Moreover, the negative realities are not speculative; they are written in the ledgers of cities across the United States that have hosted casinos for years. Study after study has shown that restaurants and bars outside the casinos close and jobs are lost; property values, and thus the tax base, decline; problem gamblers, in one way or another, cost society vast sums of public money; new businesses stay away.

Most casinos attract 80 percent or more of their market from a 35- to 50-mile radius. The SGC’s business plan confirms that their principal target for the Buffalo Creek Casino is local entertainment dollars. Casinos absorb existing entertainment, restaurant and hotel business, and leave people less money to spend everywhere else. That means fewer jobs and less sales tax collected.

A recent study of every county in the US that hosts a casino shows that personal bankruptcy rates are 100 percent higher in counties with casinos than in counties without casinos. Personal bankruptcies are not contained, individual failures; they’re a drag on the region’s entire economy. When someone goes bankrupt, we all pay a little bit.

Each compulsive gambler costs the economy between $14,006 and $22,077 per year, according to studies by casino expert Earl L. Grinols. Communities that host casinos can expect 1.5 to 2.5 percent of the adult population to become compulsive gamblers. That translates to 4,884 compulsive gamblers in the City of Buffalo, costing the economy as much as $107,482,188.

One can reasonably argue that those numbers are speculative too, though they at least have some scholarship behind them. But even if they are speculative, shouldn’t they be thrown into the questionnaire too? Shouldn’t there be some balance to the speculative numbers that the SGC wants to push on Buffalonians in order to make them think a downtown casino is an unburnished positive?

Not in Zogby’s push poll and not in the Buffalo News. Linstedt’s piece quotes one anti-casino activist, attorney Bob Kresse, whose voice was lost in a flood of press release talking points provided by Zogby and the SGC.

Two people who were polled by Zogby’s interviewers told Artvoice that they tried to raise some of these negatives during the interview. The pollsters’ response: “Moving on to the next question…”

In a push poll, what you don’t say is just as leading as what you do say.

Let’s do move on:

12. The current nine-acre building site for the downtown casino at Perry and Fulton Streets is on both sides of Fulton Street. The Seneca Nation of Indians has asked to buy the last two blocks of Fulton Street from the city so they can close it off and build on top of it. Regardless of your feeling about building a casino, do you favor or oppose selling the last two blocks of Fulton Street to the Seneca Nation of Indians?

Well, the facts are a little off: The Senecas did not ask to buy Fulton Street. They initially asked the City of Buffalo to abandon it—to give it to them, in effect. Only in the past two months has Buffalo’s Common Council come around to telling the Seneca Nation that they will have to pay for Fulton Street if they want to use it. A figure has not been set for the purchase.

It is, in any case, nonsense to try to divorce this question from one’s feeling about building a casino. If you don’t want a casino, why would you want to sell a public street to a private developer?

13. If the city of Buffalo does not sell the last two blocks of Fulton Street to the Seneca Nation of Indians, they could ask the city to allow them to build a connection or skyway over Fulton Street to connect the casino and parking buildings on either side of Fulton Street. Again, regardless of your feeling about building a casino, do you favor or oppose the Seneca Nation of Indians building a connection over Fulton Street?

14. Which would you prefer - selling the last two blocks of Fulton Street to the Seneca Indian Nation so that their construction project can be continuous, or giving them permission to build a connection overhead so they can connect the casino and parking buildings, or neither, causing visitors to the casino to have to go outside and cross the road when moving between the casino and the parking buildings?

There it is again: “…causing visitors to go outside and cross the road when moving between the casino and the parking buildings?” That doesn’t sound nice, does it? It seems unreasonable to force people outside. Why not just let the developers build whatever they want so no one has to go outside and cross the street? Why not at least let them build a skyway, like the one that connects the Rath Building to the Main Place Mall?

What on earth does this have to do with whether one thinks a casino is a good thing for downtown Buffalo? It’s as if you said to someone, “I’m not sure I want you to build your fat-rendering plant next door to my house” and that person responded, “Well, I’m going to anyway, so what color do you thinks the drapes ought to be?”

The question underlines the idea that a casino is coming, like it or not. It also sets up the last question, which the developers surely hoped to use as leverage in dealing with Buffalo’s Common Council:

15. If your city council member opposes selling the last two blocks of Fulton Street to the Seneca Nation of Indians, will that make you…to vote for him or her in the next election?

Despite the leading questions, apathetic Buffalonians answered overwhelmingly—61.9 percent—that it would make no difference. Eight percent said they’d be more likely to vote for a councilmember who opposed the sale of Fulton Street and 6.3 percent said they’d be less likely to vote for a councilmember who opposed the sale of Fulton Street. That’s probably not the negotiating tool the SGC hoped for, but it’s bad news for anti-casino activisits as well—it suggests that their message is not having sufficient impact to derail the project.

Who drafted the Zogby poll and who does it serve? Who approved the questions and how they were phrased?

These questions are answered with another question: Who paid for it? The Seneca Nation of Indians paid for it, and it serves the purposes of the SGC.

Polling expert Mark Blumenthal (whose Web site, www.mysterypollster.com, illustrates the way newspapers ought to read and write about polls) recently took Zogby International to task for its methodology in another, unrelated poll. He writes, “…anyone with the right to request changes and approve a final questionnaire is an integral part of the development process.

“Second, there’s [a] word we typically use to describe someone with the right to approve the final questionnaire: ‘Client.’”

Zogby’s client here is the SGC. Not the truth about casino gambling and its potential impact on Buffalo’s economy.