Pollster Shlomo Filber Challenges News 12 Criticism With Contrasting Election Survey

Shlomo Filber, a pollster for Channel 14, responded sharply to criticism from News 12 journalist Ilan Lukatch regarding the accuracy of Channel 14's surveys. Lukatch had accused Channel 14's polls of consistently deviating from other professional surveys, citing a recent error where Filber predicted a victory for Effi Nave in the Israeli Bar Association elections, but Amith Bechar won by a large margin.

In retaliation, Filber highlighted a News 12 poll from "Shishi Studio" that showed Tali Gottlieb leading among Likud voters before the party's primaries, while the actual results placed her 12th. Filber tweeted the comparison with Lukatch's handle, sarcastically asking, "Did I do it right?" This was meant to illustrate that News 12's own polling also failed to predict outcomes accurately.

When a user pointed out that the News 12 poll surveyed Likud voters rather than party members who voted in the primaries, Filber explained that this was his exact point: Lukatch had presented a poll taken weeks before the election as if it were a direct forecast of the final results. Filber noted that the political drama in the Knesset just a week before the vote significantly affected the election outcome, which the earlier poll could not have anticipated.

Filber concluded by emphasizing that understanding complex political situations is possible when one tries, implicitly criticizing News 12's handling of polling data. The exchange underscores ongoing tensions between media outlets over poll accuracy and political reporting in Israel.