Support Dips

“Support for California Governor Jerry Brown’s plan to shut a $27 billion budget gap has eroded since he introduced it in January . . . Democrat Brown wants to close the budget hole with a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes . . .”

But wait, aren’t we hearing here in Ohio that “prefer that Kasich balance the budget with a mix of tax increases and spending cuts“?

Or is it “. . . nearly two-thirds agree with his plan to balance the budget by making only spending cuts, without tax increases“?

Poll reporting is about the worst practice of civic journalism. Our publishers demonstrate they do not know what they are doing in every single story when they print “margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.” It would be just as valid to say, “One plus one equals two.” Only the most incompetent pollster can screw up calculating the MOE. But it takes art and intelligence to write and interpret polls, and the harder you work and the more intelligent you are the more complicated and nuanced the poll becomes, until it becomes useless for headlines. If the news industry were a news industry, it would report polls the way it reports baseball statistics. But it’s not a news industry, it’s a message industry, and guess whose message it’s carrying?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 24th, 2011 at 4:15 am and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.