Generally, we at AtAT consider ourselves healthily paranoid. After all, there's nothing wrong with maintaining a reasonable skepticism and examining possible ulterior motives when big, scary corporations are involved. So when Microsoft and NBC teamed up, we don't think it was out of line for us to expect some, shall we say, "less than objective" coverage of any Microsoft-involved stories from the unholy offspring known as MSNBC. Still, there are some folks who go all Scully on us when we voice that opinion, but for those people, we can only point to MSNBC's recent poll and smirk knowingly.

Check it out-- The Register has a nice, detailed article on the debacle that was MSNBC's online poll seeking opinions about the Microsoft-vs.-government tussle we've all come to know and love as "Redmond Justice." It seems that MSNBC asked its readers whether they agreed with Judge Jackson's findings of fact; did Microsoft have monopoly power, did they use that power illegally in a manner that harmed consumers, and what should happen to the company? Now, here's the bit that should make you go "hmmmmm": while Internet Explorer users could happily click away and register an opinion, anyone using a Netscape browser found that the poll's buttons didn't render correctly, so there was no way to vote.

So was it just an innocent instance of a severely incompetent webmaster who doesn't test in multiple browsers, or was it a deliberate attempt to skew the poll's results in favor of Microsoft? Once the problem was reported to MSNBC, the bug was corrected, allowing all readers to vote, regardless of browser choice. Except, of course, for Mac users, who found themselves unable to contribute to the poll using Netscape or IE. Now, we were almost willing to let that first problem slide, but our skeptical minds have a hard time accepting that a professional web developer would not only forget to test a web app in Netscape, but also completely forget to test on non-Windows platforms as well. After all, what better way to garner more Microsoft-friendly votes than to disable the poll for everybody except those using Internet Explorer on a Windows PC? Oh, those wacky Redmond guys...