Week 10 Abstracts

National Council on Public Polls: Twenty Questions a Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results: While reading the introduction to this article, I remembered a story I had recently read at USAToday.com, which used unscientific polls to survey bald and hairy company CEOs. This story said unscientific polls are never to be used, but the story used them and told readers that’s what they were. When I read the USA Today story, I got bored after a while and stopped reading because I didn’t feel the results were reliable or representative of the entire nation, or even of all CEOs, for that matter. I think the introduction to this article gets it right when it says only scientific polls have a place in “serious” reports.  The questions suggested here are wonderful! I really like how thoroughly they force the reporter to examine the poll. I think the questions pose a somewhat daunting task for writers and editors because they require much more research than simply taking someone’s word as gospel. But they are necessary to ensure news organizations are doing right by readers, who can be easily misled by faulty or unreliable information. I love the first two questions: “Who did this poll?” and “Who paid for it?” Those really are the most important things to know when evaluating its validity.  The article seems really strict sometimes when it says a poll’s results should not be reported unless the reporter knows it has a verifiable safeguard against age-inappropriate respondents, for example. These little things might not occur to news people but should.  One of my favorite questions was “What have other polls on this topic said?” That is such an excellent question and one possibly overlooked on a regular basis. This can help avoid embarrassment later on and keep the critics at bay. I think the theme of the whole article is, when reporting on polls, always stay one step ahead of the critics by anticipating any questions they might raise.  Stinkyjournalism.org This Web site critiques the way journalists cover issues and uncovers specific and general inaccuracies in published coverage. Many of the topics seem like ones we could cover in our open-ended blog entries for this class. For example, one post on the site criticizes a trend in covering dog attack stories to focus on and vilify one or two breeds of dogs rather than focusing on the causes of and circumstances leading up to the attack. Its author compares such coverage to law enforcement officers’ racial profiling.  The blog posts are helpfully grouped into topic, ranging from science to gossip. They are also searchable by date and publication. My biggest complaint with the site is that most of the posts are six or more months old. The most recent was from two weeks ago, but the majority of them were from last year and earlier. (In some categories, the most recent post is from 2005.) Despite the infrequent posts, some of the investigative work on the site is quite interesting. I liked one report on the site that exposed how a hunting fraud fooled the international media into thinking an 11-year-old had killed a “monster” wild boar. The report exposes business relationships and other circumstances that should have disclosed in the original reporting of the event. Investigations like this are important for journalism in general because I often wonder who will be the watch dog over the press, who is supposed to be the watch dog over the government. Independent sites like this one are a step in the right direction.  Calame comes down on NYT for math in single women story 

I remember this from the regular editing lecture last year. The New York Times reported on the front page that 51 percent of American women were living without a spouse and compared this census data with data from 1950 and 2000. The problem with the trend-spotting story was it failed to mention that the “women” in the story included 15- to 17-year-olds, 90 percent of whom still lived with their parents, until the second half of the story, which was continued on an inside page. The story was corrected after the NYT public editor Byron Calame wrote a column criticizing the report. The editor then responded within days, saying he would institute a new policy: to consult newsroom employees specializing in statistics before putting such stories in print.

 

Calame’s article then goes on to say that editors admitted that at the Page 1 meeting for that day, the story’s methodology was never questioned. This reminds me of my media ride-along experience last week. I watched editors at a large newspaper discuss whether to run a story on teenage girls and STDs. The AP story said one in four teenage girls have at least one STD. Editors from many departments immediately asked who conducted the study and how they knew it was right because the data seemed so inflated. I like Calame’s suggestion that all newsroom employees undergo some sort of numeracy training in basics like percent change, stats, etc. to keep us all skeptical of fuzzy numbers.

 Margin of Error 

This was a good one for us all to read. It’s always helpful for people to consider margin of error when comparing poll results over time. In order to do this, one might think of the margin of error as a range in which the answers could fall—if the polled sample were extended to the whole population. In other words, using the example from the criticized story, Dole’s popularity rating ranged from 34 to 42. These ranges become important when comparing results over time because if there’s overlap between two ranges, then neither result is statistically greater than the other.