Friday, June 17, 2005
Online Polls - Read the fine print
The WorldNetDaily ran a story tonight about an MSNBC online poll. The poll shows that 94% of the respondents voted yes when asked if they thought that President Bush misled the nation in order to go to war in Iraq.
The WorldNetDaily did not show reference to the fine print clearly posted on the survey with a link to more detailed information on the inaccuracies of online voluntary polling. MSNBC News tells About our Live Votes and surveys right at the bottom of the survey results.
Who in the heck is up watching MSNBC this time of the night anyway? WorldNetDaily reported approximately 6,000 responses to the poll at 10:05PM ET. This posting was put together three hours later and the count was up by another 10,000 to over 16,000 voters. At this hour most of the nation is asleep except for me and at least a few thousand folks on the West Coast watching MSNBC while surfing. That said, I can see that this poll could be accurate given the predominately liberal West Coast. That is considering that there are probably not more than 960 (6% of 16K) Bush supporters on the West Coast anyway. Of course I am joking.
All joking aside, I was beginning to trust some of the WorldNetDaily content. After all they do say in their mission statement which is quoted on their about page that they are, "...a guardian of liberty, an exponent of truth and justice, an uncompromising disseminator of news." It looks like they are at least compromising a little bit of the truth by not giving the whole truth in that this survey is very likely to be inaccurate. The MSNBC poll and survey disclaimer page uses an example of a poll taken on the subject of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal where there was a 40% difference when compared to another poll on the same subject.
The WorldNetDaily story can be found here.
The WorldNetDaily did not show reference to the fine print clearly posted on the survey with a link to more detailed information on the inaccuracies of online voluntary polling. MSNBC News tells About our Live Votes and surveys right at the bottom of the survey results.
Who in the heck is up watching MSNBC this time of the night anyway? WorldNetDaily reported approximately 6,000 responses to the poll at 10:05PM ET. This posting was put together three hours later and the count was up by another 10,000 to over 16,000 voters. At this hour most of the nation is asleep except for me and at least a few thousand folks on the West Coast watching MSNBC while surfing. That said, I can see that this poll could be accurate given the predominately liberal West Coast. That is considering that there are probably not more than 960 (6% of 16K) Bush supporters on the West Coast anyway. Of course I am joking.
All joking aside, I was beginning to trust some of the WorldNetDaily content. After all they do say in their mission statement which is quoted on their about page that they are, "...a guardian of liberty, an exponent of truth and justice, an uncompromising disseminator of news." It looks like they are at least compromising a little bit of the truth by not giving the whole truth in that this survey is very likely to be inaccurate. The MSNBC poll and survey disclaimer page uses an example of a poll taken on the subject of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal where there was a 40% difference when compared to another poll on the same subject.
The WorldNetDaily story can be found here.
