There are a few problems with this analogy. First, pollsters aren't lawyers; they are (in theory) researchers and are treated by journalists as such. Second, in a trial there are prosecutors and defense lawyers and everyone is working off the same page. There is an established pool of evidence that either side can argue over. What Luntz proposes is a trial in which a lawyer makes his case with no opposition and no opportunity for a jury to consider the source.

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"These are not complicated questions," says Diane Colasanto, who was president of the AAPOR when it reprimanded Luntz. "It is simply wanting to know: 'How many people did you question? What were the questions?' He did finally give us some information, but it wasn't enough. It didn't really explain what the figures were based on. All we could tell was it seemed like there might have been some survey done.

"We understand the need for confidentiality, but once a pollster makes results public, the information needs to be public. People need to be able to evaluate whether it was sound research."

Warren Mitofsky, the current standards chair at AAPOR, says the complaint against Luntz was a rarity. There are only one or two complaints filed against pollsters each year and they hardly ever go as far as Luntz's.

Of course, critics of the AAPOR complaint note that the group is not really the domain of political pollsters. The group's membership mostly includes academic pollsters and commercial research firms. But even in the world of political pollsters, Luntz is a special case, says David W. Moore, author of the book "The Super Pollsters."

"And it's not just a question of being a political pollster," Moore says. "Both Peter Hart and Bob Teeter are political pollsters and both are very solid. When you hear them talk, they genuinely try to analyze the data." (Hart, a Democratic pollster, and Teeter, a Republican, work together to poll for NBC and The Wall Street Journal.)

Luntz's work and that of other celebrity pollsters, such as Fitzpatrick, is nothing more than "propaganda" masked as research, Moore says.

"What bothers me is they are given so much prominence. One of the reasons media organizations started doing their own polling was to make sure they wouldn't get biased data." Now, the media pay these people to poll, he says. "The whole trend is really a backward step."

Luntz has risen to media stardom on the strength of his work with focus groups, typically gatherings of a dozen or so people, carefully screened to be representative of a larger population. A moderator leads the group in a discussion, and carefully chooses questions to elicit the participants' deep feelings about candidates or issues.

And Luntz is an able moderator. Watching him work a room is like watching a good politician: He's bright, funny, amiable and connects with his subjects. He speaks in simple, direct sentences, and asks questions like "Is Bush a smart guy?" or "Does he have what it takes to be president?" He's a first-rate empathizer, all grins and furrowed brows.

This has undoubtedly helped the media pine for him, but it's also fallen in love with those wonderful little gizmos he often gives his groups that allow voters to instantly make their opinion known during a speech or debate -- a little dial that they can turn one way for approval and the other for disapproval.

As an event unfolds, he sits back and watches a constantly shifting fever-line that shows which statements people favor or dislike. If you have ever wondered about the fickleness of the American public, just watch one of Luntz's dial tapes as I did during the 1996 presidential debate in Hartford, Conn. It's an experience in terror. One line may elicit a negative response, while a different line meaning basically the same thing is all positive.

Of course, political focus groups aren't new. Their use dates back to World War II. They allow the moderator to dig into specific questions more deeply than "Do you support abortion rights?" or "Do you use Clorox?" and check for emotional responses.

They are not, however, substitutes for polling data. They create no hard numbers, and since the groups are usually small, it's hard to extrapolate any definitive results. "You cannot generalize from the results of a focus group, period," says Mitofsky. "You can get results you can explore in a real survey, but that's all. A lot of people do research on the cheap and that's a good way to get in trouble."

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