I chose to read the Method to our Mathness stories “How Not to Conduct a Presidential Poll” and “A Billion People Can Be Wrong.”
The first story demonstrates all the things that can easily go wrong with polls that so few people remember to think about. The most obvious is, How do they decide parameters to answer their questions? The example given was a poll used to determine who is most likely to attend the Iowa caucus. How does the newspaper that made the poll decide what makes someone a likely candidate to go to the caucus?
Another problem is with the time period chosen to conduct polls. The one in question was a telephone poll performed between Christmas and New Year’s. The obvious problem here is that not many people will be home at this time of year, and the ones who are may have a particular trend in candidate preferences. Also, the smaller the poll group, the higher the margin for error. If a poll group is divided into further subgroups, there is a higher chance for discrepancies. Although the author of this particular critique, Barry Sussman, turned out to be wrong in calling out several of the Des Moines Register’s shortcomings, his ideas are basically true and must be taken into account when drawing conclusions from polls.
Of course, knowledge like this about polls can be used to a businessperson’s advantage if they know how to manipulate numbers in their company’s favor. A good example is in the Sports Illustrated story “A Billion People Can Be Wrong.” The story looks into how Super Bowl publicists arrive at the claim that a billion people worldwide watch the big game. In actuality, the NFL reports that the Super Bowl will be broadcast to a potential audience of 1 billion. It’s the news services’ fault that they disregard the “potential” and interpret the 1 billion as fact, but it’s an error that works in the NFL’s favor.
What both of these stories have in common is that they show that it definitely pays to pay attention when it comes to random numbers and statistics in news stories. Copy editors should be wary of taking claims at face value without questioning how the writer or publicist arrived at that determination. This is further emphasized by the third site I looked at, FactCheck.org. This site is limited to political facts, but it’s entirely for checking information about candidates and their policies, voting statistics and results, and also a source for recent happenings in the realm of politics. With the upcoming presidential election and all the ensuing news stories about it, this site is a valuable resource in straightening out claims that news stories make.
Tags: inaccuracies, polls, statistics, Week 5
