Who Doctored the Tom Cruise Poll in Parade Magazine?

Tom Cruise appeared in Parade Magazine inside many folks Sunday newspapers two weekends ago.  The article was kind to Cruise and a decent enough read. 

Who Doctored the Poll?

But one thing that stood out was a poll that came out of the story claimed that 84 percent of respondents blamed the press for Tom Cruise's horrific public relations in the past year.

Not the couch jumping antics, his attacks on Brooke Shields dealing with post-partum depression or his interview with the "glib" Matt Lauer.

Now since it's really hard to get 84% of people to agree on anything - apparently a bit of investigations was done.

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Page Six gives these details:

Parade publicist Alexis Collado tells (The NY Post): "We at Parade found this a little bit fishy, so we did some investigating. We found out more than 14,000 (of the 18,000-plus votes) that came in were cast from only 10 computers! One computer was responsible for nearly 8,400 votes alone, all blaming the media for Tom's troubles.

We also discovered that at least two other machines were the sources of inordinate numbers of votes.

It seems these folks (whoever they may be) resorted to extraordinary measures to try to portray Tom in a positive light for the Parade.com survey.

There is even a chance they wrote a special 'bot' program for the sole purpose of skewing the results, rather than casting the votes by hand on a computer." Cruise spokesman Paul Bloch told us, "I know nothing about the poll, so we have nothing to comment on."

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Jossip notes that while nobody is making the outright claim Cruise or the Church of Scientology rigged the poll, Parade says there was plenty of suspicious behavior.

So - someone skewed the results?  Any theories?

Jossip has much more here.

--Cathy Beers