Fox "News" Is Bad At Its Job Edition
First of all, the least you could do before running something on the air like this --
-- is have someone just look at the screen and tell you if the numbers add up to 100% (plus or minus a 20% margin of error, perhaps?).
Second, if you've made a mistake like the one above, you might want to double check and make sure you don't do this:
That's right, apparently Fox's source managed to poll 193% of Republicans. Priceless.
HOW I FEEL WHEN I’M TWO WEEKS OUT FROM QUALS
9 years ago
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2 comments:
I expect this was a case of oddly constructed poll questions, rather than an intent to deceive. You know, like option A is "Likely or very likely", whereas option B is "Very likely" and then you have some overlap between the groups.
Not that Fox News couldn't be trying to pull a fast one - they're sinful and all that. And perhaps they write polls ambiguously for dishonest reasons. But it doesn't seem reasonable to argue that in addition to being liars they cannot count.
Joel, I didn't mean to suggest that they were actively attempting to lie to people. I assume that like any other media organization, they had some information and an angle, and they assembled the statistics to help make a point.
Usually with my "how to deceive with statistics" series my goal is to help people realize that the statistics usually don't quite say what the media is using them to say. I'm hoping to encourage a healthy skepticism of news involving statistics, but I don't think these are examples of the media being unusually dishonest.
My complaint here is that Fox tried to do what media does with statistics, but was really *really* bad at it. Either the data was not of the type that lends itself to pie charts, or there was a transcription error, or something like that. In any case, these are some pretty severe breaches in quality control.
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