CNN, allegedly the most trusted name in something, took it upon themselves to defibrillate a long-since dismissed November 2007 email-forward which suggested that Barack Obama was a madrassa-trained terrorist who didn't properly drape himself in the American flag, posting one of their patented "Quick Polls" that asked, "Does Barack Obama show the proper patriotism for someone who wants to be President of the United States."
CNN builds this "poll" around an email that flew to inboxes far and wide in the months before the Iowa primary, in which it was alleged that Obama was "secretly hiding his Muslim faith" and categorically refused to properly pledge allegiance to the American flag. The matter dogged Obama for some time despite carrying no more merit than the average missive from the fictional spouses of recently deposed African leaders seeking bank shelters for outrageous sums of money. The big, blockbuster finding was that Obama maybe practiced the act of singing "The Star Spangled Banner" incorrectly. No one really should be questioning the patriotism of any of the Presidential candidates, but the media did their due diligence, traveling to far-flung Indonesian schools in an effort to prove that the candidate did not graduate summa cum laude from an al Qaeda training camp.
The central flaw with online polls of this nature is that they are more or less guaranteed to yield statistical results that aren't based on anything sincere. The polls go up, the word goes out, partisans of all stripes rush to the site, and eventually, the Ron Paul supporters stay up all night to try to generate a result that proves Paul is the only candidate who really believes in freedom. If Obama loses the poll, someone gets to suggest that public opinion has been measured against the candidate. And if he wins the poll, it becomes proof that the candidate benefits from the support of wild-eyed, cultish zombies infected with Hope Rabies.
Of course, what CNN gets out of it is a news story, and this poll is currently driving the #4 Most Viewed story on the CNN website. CNN has taken to bullet-pointing their stories at the top of the page for the benefit of people who can't bother to read, and their second bullet goes a long way to demonstrating just how dishonest the whole enterprise is: "Obama cited for not wearing American flag lapel pin, among other things." Naturally, the only entity doing any "citing," is CNN itself, with their disingenuous poll. As a vehicle for news, CNN's found themselves a very swift boat, spinning in idiot circles.