Blog @ MoreWhat.com

Another case of the misleading headline appears in the Washington Post. Other than the obvious reasons why that is bad comes from the fact that WaPo sponsored the poll being discussed. If one reads the piece, some light is shed on something somewhat more accurate…. the results as described by the sponsor. An example follows.

At the same time, Congress fares little better with the public on the war. Just 35 percent said they approve of the way congressional Democrats are handling the situation in Iraq, with 63 percent disapproving. Two-thirds of independents give the Democrats negative marks on the war.

The latest poll was conducted July 18 to 21 among a random sample of 1,125 adults, just after Senate Democrats failed to pass legislation that would set a timetable for the start of troop withdrawals from the war zone. The results have a three-percentage-point margin of sampling error.

To headline that the Democrats are favored on war is rather meaningless if the measured difference is 4 points ( 31 to 35) and the error is 3 points. Reasonable people would conclude the poll result on this item is a draw. Therefore if readers are only scanning the headlines they can be left with the impression of a much larger and more meaningful difference. Even if reading the report their impression may be influenced by the headline. And in addition to these problems, little is said about details of a respondent’s favoring or opposing the war. Anyone can be opposed to the status of the war. But there can be many reasons why. You can be opposed simply because you oppose war of any kind or you could be opposed to the influence of antiwar sentiment on the handling of the war. Two enormously different positions that may be lost in poll responses limited to, for instance, yes or no answers.

WaPo and ABC should be a little more careful on publishing polling data. The headline is available at the source via the link near the top of the page.
Stanford Matthews
MoreWhat.com

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Public Affairs, Terrorism, Iraq, war, wordpress, Politics, News Media, disclosure, ethics, oversight, Afghanistan, United States, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.