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Fred's son Registered: 10/18/00 Posts: 12,949 Loc: Dominican Republ Last seen: 9 years, 17 days |
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infidelGOD writes:
so you're saying that if the FOX news viewers had answered that "it is my opinion that WMD has been found in Iraq", somehow that would make them correct in expressing their opinion? I'm sorry, those questions are pretty specific and deal with facts. no room for opinions in those questions, unlike the questions from the emailer. No, I'm saying that unless we know the exact phrasing of the questions, the conclusions we draw may not be correct. For example, Myerson doesn't put quotes around the questions, so for all we know he is paraphrasing the actual questions asked. And yes, the precise wording of the questions is critical -- read the pollster methodology link EchoVortex provided. wrong. those four questions cannot be answered with a true or false. if you want to try it go ahead. I already did. Re-read my post. try this one: Do a majority of Iraqis support the US invasion? give me a true or false and no bullshit polls. Yes they do. All polls taken to date in Iraq show that. As for "bullshit polls", please provide for us polls (bullshit or otherwise) showing the majority of Israelis, Chileans, Thais, Ugandans, Chinese, etc. opposed the invasion. You claim that one of the original questions, "do most people in 'other countries' oppose the invasion" can be answered true or false with no empirical evidence available to support the answer, yet you say the same question asked of Iraqis cannot? Be objective, dude -- if you are going to apply conditions, apply them equally. And again, I must point out the abominable phrasing of that question -- if in fact Myerson has given us the correct phrasing. you're saying that unless we get poll results from every country in the world, we can't know for certain that most of the world didn't support the invasion of Iraq? you're really stretching here. You're saying that unless we get properly run telephone polls from Iraq, we must reject the polls we do have, and can't know for certain that most Iraqis don't support the invasion of Iraq? You're really stretching here. everyone knows that most of the world was against it. Actually, "everyone" knows no such thing. Many people hold that opinion without any evidence that meets your standards or EchoVortex's standards. If "bullshit polls" are to be rejected, is it not logical that "no polls at all" should also be rejected? You can't have it both ways. it's not some huge misperception. it's fact. No, it is not "fact", according to the standards you insist on setting for the same question restricted to Iraqis. See above. the UN was against it. Since no resolution following 1441 was ever put to a vote, we don't even know that the majority of the UN Security Council was against it, let alone the UN as a body. even in the countries that supported the war, there were many people against it. Finally, you state something that is verifiably factual. Congratulations. yes, we all read what he said in the State of the Union address. Then you know that his argument was always to act before the threat became imminent. you're hardly applying the "same standards". I raised my doubts about those four questions based on what any reasonable person would think. a reasonable person would not think that Iraq had a "close working relationship" with al qaida based on the laughable evidence you give: You missed the point entirely. I was pointing out that people don't always listen or read carefully -- sometimes they "skim" information. There has been evidence presented that al-Qaeda operatives had contact and relationships with various Iraqi Ba'athists. Does the evidence at this time indicate a "close working" relationship? In my opinion, no. But there was definitely some relationship. I'm sorry man but those three questions are not open to this kind of interpretation. you either get it right or you get it wrong. unlike the four questions posed by the emailer, which can be debated. You are letting your prejudice show. All seven questions are open to interpretation, depending on how they are phrased. You are setting different standards for the ones you like than the ones you don't. Try to step back and look at all seven questions objectively. I don't think that the words of those "shoving their way towards the pollsters in order to speak their minds" are representative of the country as a whole. do you? Why not? It can't have escaped your attention that a very significant number of those doing the shoving had some very uncomplimentary opinions about the US involvement. They weren't anxious to praise the US, they were anxious to finally get their own opinions recorded, no matter what those opinions might be. I don't think any poll taken in Iraq now can be considered accurate, and so the question: "Do a majority of Iraqis support the US invasion?" is meaningless. And I submit that an imperfect poll has more informational value than no poll at all, as is the case with Uganda, China, Thailand and the vast majority of the 180 countries in the world. You hold the opposite view. Let's leave it to the readers to decide whose view is the more valid. so you're saying that because we didn't sell a massive "quantity" of anthrax that it's not significant? Compared to the thousands of tons of munitions sold by China, Russia, France and others -- munitions that were actually used, it was not a significant amount, whether measured in tonnage, by dollar amount, by percentage of Iraq's weaponry arsenal, by kill potential, or by percentage of actual use. so what's your point? it's not staged because everyone else does it too? that's pretty weak. The point was, that the event was not staged. The event happened, and would have happened whether Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Moore, embedded videographers, or no one at all had filmed it. wait a minute, you've never watched FOX news?? so you must really know what you're talking about. how can you know if its biased or not? I cannot know if FOX News's televised newscasts present inaccurate or incomplete information or not. I do however know enough about causality to know that a truly random poll of TV viewers using those three questions and no others cannot prove that the misperceptions held by those answering the questions are the direct result of the news programs they watch -- regardless of which shows those might be. Any sociology prof worth his salt would raise exactly the same points I have here. The methodology of the poll is flawed if the purpose of the poll was to find out which news shows are the least accurate. I don't know if you're really in touch with the average FOX news viewer, but they're an intellectually unimpressive lot and it really isn't surprising that they're also the most misinformed. If true, that is exactly my point -- and now also EchoVortex's point. The less intellectually curious or critical you are, the more likely you are to watch shows that challenge your own mindset least. I'll go further and say that this extends even to those who are curious and critical. I doubt, for example, that you spend much time reading op-ed pieces from the Wall Street Journal, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, or National Review when compared to the amount of time you spend reading op-ed pieces from more liberal sources. I doubt you'd be defending FOX news if you actually watched it once in a while. I am not "defending" FOX News -- I am merely pointing out the obvious; the same thing the e-mail writer points out. Virtually everyone holds misperceptions, and in a very large number of cases the misperceptions one holds are subconsciously "willful" misperceptions -- i.e. if one is a "pacifist", one tends to hold a certain set of misperceptions that a "warmonger" would not, and vice versa. Be honest, now. Could you not devise a group of questions on current affairs that would target a particular mindset? Of course you could. And note that the e-mail writer doesn't even say that the three questions chosen were deliberately chosen to prove a particular point -- he merely points out correctly that they all have a commonality. Look, here's the most important point of all, one we must resolve before proceeding with further discussion -- not only do we not know the exact phrasing of the questions, we don't even know that there were only three questions asked. What if there were ten asked and Myerson is reporting on only three? As a matter of fact, the more I re-read Myerson's post, the more apparent it becomes that his reports of the questions are in fact paraphrases. Not only that, but I find it passing strange that "Researchers from the Program on International Policy Attitudes (a joint project of several academic centers, some of them based at the University of Maryland) and Knowledge Networks, a California-based polling firm, have spent the better part of the year tracking the public's misperceptions of major news events and polling people to find out just where they go to get things so balled up. "In a series of polls from May through September, the researchers discovered.... (snip)" Okay, here we have a joint project of several academic centers spending more than six months of effort (how can that be correct unless there were polls taken before May, by the way?) tracking misperceptions of "major news events" in a series of polls. Sounds like a pretty thorough project. And clearly if they covered major news events there were more than three questions asked. Yet the only three questions Myerson comments on happen to deal with the Iraq invasion. Hmmmm. Could it be that there were in fact more than three questions about Iraq in those multiple surveys? Could it be that the answers to those other questions show the PBS/NPR crowd in a worse light? And what about the other "major news events"? How well did the PBS/NPR crowd do on those? Was the data on these other events not made available to Myerson? Why not? I repeat -- Myerson's article is nothing more than excess verbiage if taken out of context. Let's see the entire series of surveys, including the exact phrasing of every question asked in every poll in the series, before either of us spend any more time spinning our wheels, okay? no one is saying that the event never happened. is your definition of "staged" something that didn't happen and was computer generated or something of that sort? according to Websters: 2stage (v): 1 : to produce (as a play) on a stage 2 : to produce or cause to happen for public view or public effect The filmers of the event didn't "produce or cause to happen" the event. They recorded it. Some recorded it differently than others, as EchoVortex points out. But neither those who used tight closeups nor those who used wide panoramas caused the event to happen. Nobody "staged" it -- it happened, and would have happened whether there was any film in the cameras or not, whether the segment producers edited it one way or the other, or even if they had chosen never to broadcast the footage at all. I don't know how much plainer I can make this. I am not defending the way it was edited, or defending whatever commentary may have been added in voice-over; I am merely saying the event was not "staged". It wasn't. the emailer might have a point about people holding different views having different misperceptions. but he sure chose some poor examples to try to prove his point that PBS viewers are as misinformed as FOX news viewers. Perhaps he did. But if those questions had been included in the poll, do you honestly and objectively believe that no more than 23% of the PBS/NPR group would have answered them incorrectly? And that no less than 80% of the FOX viewers would have answered them incorrectly? Be honest with us, now. You seem to have a pretty firm opinion of the mindest of the average FOX viewer -- can you see the numbers being identical for those four questions? I have no doubt that liberals have some misperceptions of their own, but I'd bet that it's nowhere near as bad as those held by FOX news viewers. Then let me say the same thing to you that EchoVortex said to me -- provide proof. you should really watch FOX news sometime. I haven't had a television in sixteen years, and when I do visit my parents in Canada, their cable package doesn't include FOX News. They do have CNN, however. But, just in the last couple of days I started doing some comparisons of CNN internet coverage of world events vs FOX internet coverage of the same events. This was an unintentional thing prompted by Baby_Hitler's posting of some CNN links and a FOX link. These days I seldom visit either site on my own. It is clearly far too early to draw any conclusions from my admittedly meager sampling efforts to date, but it has been my impression so far that the information provided by the FOX internet site is very noticeably more complete and detailed than that provided by the CNN internet site. I realize that this has no relevance to their TELEVISION coverage, and it may be that CNN just doesn't want to pay for as much net bandwidth as FOX is willing to, or maybe CNN deliberately skimps on the detail on their internet site in an effort to "tease" people into watching their television site where they make money from commercials. I do believe I'll keep the experiment going for a while longer, though. pinky
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Two inch dick..but it spins!? ![]() Registered: 11/29/01 Posts: 34,247 Loc: Lost In Space |
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Nicely done pinky.
-------------------- You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for that my dear friend is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. ~ Adrian Rogers
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illusion ![]() Registered: 04/18/02 Posts: 3,040 Loc: there |
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try this one: Do a majority of Iraqis support the US invasion? give me a true or false and no bullshit polls.
Yes they do. All polls taken to date in Iraq show that. really? do you know the exact phrasing of the questions? remember this from you: "unless we know the exact phrasing of the questions, the conclusions we draw may not be correct"? how can we trust these polls taken in Iraq? do you know the exact polling methodology and the exact phrasing of the words? according to you, if we don't know these things, the results may not be correct so how can you expect me to trust them? You claim that one of the original questions, "do most people in 'other countries' oppose the invasion" can be answered true or false with no empirical evidence available to support the answer polls have been taken in other coutries that showed massive opposition to the war so there is empirical evidence out there. I can search and post some of them but it won't be good enough for you because I don't have the results from every country in the world. oh well. You're saying that unless we get properly run telephone polls from Iraq, we must reject the polls we do have, and can't know for certain that most Iraqis don't support the invasion of Iraq? no. I'm saying that polls taken in a war zone might not be the most accurate. but you seem to have no trouble swallowing them, even taking them as fact (regarding the emailer's question) while ignoring the obvious fact that the majority of the world was against the invasion. Actually, "everyone" knows no such thing. Many people hold that opinion without any evidence that meets your standards or EchoVortex's standards. If "bullshit polls" are to be rejected, is it not logical that "no polls at all" should also be rejected? You can't have it both ways. actually everyone does know it. even the neocons on this board know that most of the world was opposed to the war. and there are polls out there, a lot more scientific than the polls taken of Iraqis "shoving their way towards the pollsters". and I think the fact that the UN was against it can be taken as evidence that the majority of the world was against it. Since no resolution following 1441 was ever put to a vote, we don't even know that the majority of the UN Security Council was against it, let alone the UN as a body. I didn't expect to see this kind of reasoning from you. why do you suppose the resolution sought by the US after 1441 never came to a vote? it couldn't be because there wasn't enough support for it? You are letting your prejudice show. All seven questions are open to interpretation, depending on how they are phrased. You are setting different standards for the ones you like than the ones you don't. Try to step back and look at all seven questions objectively. yes lets look at them objectively. these questions aren't in the same category. one set of questions simply leaves no room for any interpretation. the other set of questions can be reasonably debated. surely you can see the difference here. I'm not applying different standards. I'm just using common sense. do you really think that a PBS viewer who believes that the statue scene was staged is as "wrong" as a FOX news viewer who believes that we found WMD in Iraq? or someone believing that the majority of Iraqis opposed the invasion is as "wrong" as someone who believes that Iraq had a close working relationship with al qaida? Why not? It can't have escaped your attention that a very significant number of those doing the shoving had some very uncomplimentary opinions about the US involvement. They weren't anxious to praise the US, they were anxious to finally get their own opinions recorded, no matter what those opinions might be. regardless of what they said, people who are eager to be polled can't be taken as an accurate representation of the whole. Compared to the thousands of tons of munitions sold by China, Russia, France and others -- munitions that were actually used, it was not a significant amount, whether measured in tonnage, by dollar amount, by percentage of Iraq's weaponry arsenal, by kill potential, or by percentage of actual use. so if North Korea had sold Iraq a nuclear bomb, but Iraq never used it, you wouldn't consider the sale a "significant amount" compared to the munitions sold by others? now you're setting the condition that it actually has to be used for it to be significant? what exactly is your point? the US did sell some antrax cultures and other precursors to biological weapons to Iraq. all I'm saying is that it can be considered a sale of a significant amount of arms and therefor the question that the emailer asks doesn't have a clear cut answer. The point was, that the event was not staged. The event happened, and would have happened whether Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Moore, embedded videographers, or no one at all had filmed it. are you intentionally missing my point here or what? again I say: no one is saying that the event never happened. your definition of staged seems to be: something that didn't happen. I think the definition: "to produce or cause to happen for public view or public effect" applies here. here are some synomyms of "staged": theatrical, artificial, unreal. yes the event happened. but the version that was fed to the public was a "staged" version. get it now? they made it appear that it was some kind of spontaneous act by thousands of Iraqis to topple the statue. it wasn't. yes the event happened, but the version that we got was a staged, theatrical farce. Okay, here we have a joint project of several academic centers spending more than six months of effort (how can that be correct unless there were polls taken before May, by the way?) tracking misperceptions of "major news events" in a series of polls. Sounds like a pretty thorough project. And clearly if they covered major news events there were more than three questions asked. Yet the only three questions Myerson comments on happen to deal with the Iraq invasion. Hmmmm. Could it be that there were in fact more than three questions about Iraq in those multiple surveys? Could it be that the answers to those other questions show the PBS/NPR crowd in a worse light? And what about the other "major news events"? How well did the PBS/NPR crowd do on those? Was the data on these other events not made available to Myerson? Why not? gee, just a while ago, you were saying to me: "A lot of what you raise is useless speculation anyway" The less intellectually curious or critical you are, the more likely you are to watch shows that challenge your own mindset least yes exactly. and doesn't it follow that they are also more likely to be furthur misinformed by the biased news that they watch? it appears you agree somewhat with the original article. you don't attempt to show that FOX news viewers are NOT misinformed. you only try to make it appear normal by saying that the PBS/NPR audience is equally as misinformed, of which you have no proof whatsoever except a few questions from an emailer which don't really hold up. I doubt, for example, that you spend much time reading op-ed pieces from the Wall Street Journal, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, or National Review when compared to the amount of time you spend reading op-ed pieces from more liberal sources actually, I do read the Wall Street Journal and Businessweek magazine and National Review and I even watch FOX news sometimes (for laughs). and I also read op-ed pieces from so called "liberal sources" like TIME magazine, the Washington Post, NY Times and LA Times. and having seen bias on both sides, I can unequivacally say that FOX news is by far the most biased major news organization in the US. I am not "defending" FOX News oh you're not? I am merely pointing out the obvious; the same thing the e-mail writer points out. Virtually everyone holds misperceptions as I already said, I agree that everyone hold misperceptions based on their beliefs. what the original article is saying and what I'm saying is that the average FOX news viewer is more likely to hold these misperceptions than anyone else. either because FOX news misinforms them or because misinformed people watch FOX news. let's set this ridiculous argument of causality aside for a minute because it's impossible to prove either way. the fact remains that FOX news viewers are more misinformed. I have no doubt that liberals have some misperceptions of their own, but I'd bet that it's nowhere near as bad as those held by FOX news viewers. Then let me say the same thing to you that EchoVortex said to me -- provide proof. read the original article. FOX news viewers are misinformed. you never really disputed this. you (or actually the emailer) just tried to say that PBS/NPR viewers were equally as misinformed based on hypothetical polls of some rather poor questions. if you agree with the emailer, I think it's up to you to provide proof that the PBS/NPR audience is as misinformed as FOX news viewers.
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(hard) member Registered: 02/06/02 Posts: 859 Last seen: 15 years, 4 months |
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People in India, the second most populous nation in the world, overwhelming opposed the war:
Link Here is a link to the Pew Global Attitudes project: Pew Global Attitudes Project Although the question "were/are you in favor or opposed to the war in Iraq" was not asked, this poll suggests that 74% of Indonesians and significant numbers of people in other countries (including Kuwait!) are worried about a potential US military threat. Here is a quotation from the report summary: "In Western Europe, negative views of America have declined somewhat since just prior to the war in Iraq, when anti-war sentiment peaked. But since last summer, favorable opinions of the U.S have slipped in nearly every country for which trend measures are available. Views of the American people, while still largely favorable, have fallen as well. The belief that the U.S. pursues a unilateralist foreign policy, which had been extensive last summer, has only grown in the war's aftermath." Also: "In addition, the bottom has fallen out of support for America in most of the Muslim world. Negative views of the U.S. among Muslims, which had been largely limited to countries in the Middle East, have spread to Muslim populations in Indonesia and Nigeria. Since last summer, favorable ratings for the U.S. have fallen from 61% to 15% in Indonesia and from 71% to 38% among Muslims in Nigeria." We already know that pulic opinion in Europe, both western and eastern, was solidly against the war. Here is another link just in case: BBC News The war was also opposed in Japan: Link You may also want to look at the Gallup International polls, which may found here: Gallup International (it is not possible to link directly to the results, but if you navigate the "Survey Archive" it should be easy enough to find. The pre-war Gallup international polls showed that large percentages of the public all over the world were against the war under any circumstances, while many would support the war only with explicit UN sanction and approval. The percentage who supported the US and its allies acting unilateraly (which is what happened) was in the single digits in most countries, and never rose above about 20% anywhere else. Opposition to the war was especially strong in Argentina, and quite high throughout Latin America. The post-war polls showed a slight flip-flop in some countries (such as Australia and New Zealand), but the large majority of the countries surveyed still believed even after the war that military action was not justified. So there you have it: common people in Europe, Russia, India, all of the Islamic world, Latin America, Japan, much of Africa--all were, and still are, opposed to the war. The only real question mark is China (Hong Kong, by the way, was against war), but even if we were perversely to assume that the Chinese people supported this war, that still wouldn't be enough to tip the balance of overall world opinion in favor. If you still wish to entertain this delusional fantasy that a sliver of hope or evidence exists that the majority of the world's people actually supported the US coalition war, be my guest. You could still argue, I suppose, that none of these polls constitutes definitive proof and that you know better, but that would be like going out without an umbrella when all the meteorologists forecast rain and the thunderheads are piling up on the horizon.
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Fred's son Registered: 10/18/00 Posts: 12,949 Loc: Dominican Republ Last seen: 9 years, 17 days |
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infidelGOD writes:
how can we trust these polls taken in Iraq? do you know the exact polling methodology and the exact phrasing of the words? according to you, if we don't know these things, the results may not be correct so how can you expect me to trust them? That cuts both ways. We don't know the exact phrasing of the questions (or even the number of questions) asked in the survey mentioned by Myerson, yet you have no difficulty accepting that they "prove" FOX News is distorted. You don't even know that there were polls taken at all in the countries I mention, yet you have no difficulty claiming the non-existent polls "prove" the "rest of the world" disapproves of the invasion. You can't have it both ways, dude. If it is correct for you to say it is a fact that the rest of the world disapproved -- with no poll results (incomplete or otherwise) at all to back you up -- then using the exact same standards as you, it is correct to say the Iraqis approved. polls have been taken in other coutries that showed massive opposition to the war so there is empirical evidence out there. I can search and post some of them but it won't be good enough for you because I don't have the results from every country in the world. oh well. Not just not good enough for me, not good enough for anyone. Look, you are the one claiming that this particular question of the original three can be answered as fact -- if no standards are used to verify the fact. Yet you claim the question about Iraqis' approval cannot be answered as fact if the same standards (or more accurately lack of standards) are applied. You can't have it both ways. I'm saying that polls taken in a war zone might not be the most accurate. but you seem to have no trouble swallowing them... And you seem to have no trouble swallowing non-existent polls. ... even taking them as fact (regarding the emailer's question) while ignoring the obvious fact that the majority of the world was against the invasion. How do we know this is an "obvious fact"? In the absence of rigorous polls we know no such thing. Your stubbornness on this point is a textbook illustration of the precise point the e-mail writer is making -- your personal convictions on an as-yet unresolved matter of "fact" is coloring your beliefs, even though you don't watch FOX News (except for comic relief). You want to believe the "rest of the world" opposed the invasion, so you claim it as fact that they did, with no hard evidence. You want to believe the Iraqis also opposed the invasion, so you ignore evidence that they didn't. You have a choice here -- either admit the original question asked cannot be answered yes or no, or admit that the question about Iraqis can also be answered yes or no. You can't have it both ways. even the neocons on this board know that most of the world was opposed to the war. Incorrect. No one on this board knows that as fact. There is simply not enough data available to prove it. As it happens, I personally think most of the world was opposed, but that doesn't make it fact -- by the standards you and EchoVortex insist on applying to the question of Iraqi approval. and I think the fact that the UN was against it can be taken as evidence that the majority of the world was against it. You don't know the UN was against it. No vote was ever taken in the UN General Assembly on the issue. As a matter of fact, no vote was ever taken in the UN Security Council on the issue either. This is readily verifiable, by the way. why do you suppose the resolution sought by the US after 1441 never came to a vote? Can you not remember the news reports you read even six months ago? Yet another illustration of a non-FOX News viewer getting things wrong. The reason they never bothered to vote on it was because France made it clear in no uncertain terms that they would veto the resolution regardless of how many others favored it. yes lets look at them objectively. these questions aren't in the same category. Incorrect. All the questions are in the same category. All of them have to day with the "major news events" (in this case events leading up to the invasion of Iraq) the survey purported to address. one set of questions simply leaves no room for any interpretation. I have pointed out they do. At least two -- the question of how many opposed the invasion and the question of how close the relationship between the Ba'athist regime and al Qaeda operatives really was -- are indeed open to interpretation. the other set of questions can be reasonably debated. No more reasonably than can the first set. surely you can see the difference here. By the standards you yourself apply, no I can't. I'm not applying different standards. Yeah you are. You are saying that no polls at all trump the Iraqi polls, and you are saying that in the "imminent threat" question we must allow some wiggle room for interpretation but must allow none in the "close working" relationship. If that isn't different standards, what is? do you really think that a PBS viewer who believes that the statue scene was staged is as "wrong" as a FOX news viewer who believes that we found WMD in Iraq? As EchoVortex points out, we are deciding issues of fact here. There are no degrees to it, it is either wrong or not. regardless of what they said, people who are eager to be polled can't be taken as an accurate representation of the whole. Then telephone polls are worthless as well, since only those eager to make their opinions known cooperate with the pollsters. Those who are not eager just hang up the phone and go back to their dinner. And I would still like to hear your explanation of how no polls at all can "be taken as an accurate representation of the whole". so if North Korea had sold Iraq a nuclear bomb, but Iraq never used it, you wouldn't consider the sale a "significant amount" compared to the munitions sold by others? Nope. It would not be a significant amount. now you're setting the condition that it actually has to be used for it to be significant? Nope. I gave about five different criteria -- by tonnage, by dollar amount, by percentage of total arsenal, by kill potential, by actual use. You can repeat this till you are blue in the face, but it doesn't change facts -- the anthrax cultures Iraq obtained were not a significant amount by any measure of Iraq's weaponry. all I'm saying is that it can be considered a sale of a significant amount of arms... A significant amount by what measure? By dollar amount? By tonnage? By kill potential? By percentage of total arsenal? By actual use? are you intentionally missing my point here or what? again I say: no one is saying that the event never happened. Then why are we still arguing? your definition of staged seems to be: something that didn't happen. Not at all. My definition of "staged" is identical to the dictionary definition you provided -- "to produce or cause to happen for public view or public effect". The filmers didn't cause the event to happen, for public view or otherwise. They merely filmed it and broadcast it. yes the event happened. but the version that was fed to the public was a "staged" version. get it now? No, it wasn't "staged". They didn't cause the event to happen. Get it now? they made it appear that it was some kind of spontaneous act by thousands of Iraqis to topple the statue. So your claim is that the statue was toppled at the command of the news segment directors? Proof, please. gee, just a while ago, you were saying to me: "A lot of what you raise is useless speculation anyway" You missed the point entirely. It is not speculation to ask what happened to the questions which had to do with the other major news events mentioned in the article. Note the use of the plural -- "major news events". Maybe there really were just three questions asked about one of the major news events -- the invasion of Iraq -- in which case the survey was clearly a piece of crap, but let's move on anyway. How many questions were asked about the other major news events, and why do we have no commentary on the results of those questions? and doesn't it follow that they are also more likely to be furthur misinformed by the biased news that they watch? It is a reasonable assumption to make, yes. All I point out is that the methodology of a survey asking a mere three sloppily worded questions -- all of which fall on the same side of a single issue -- cannot prove that assumption. you don't attempt to show that FOX news viewers are NOT misinformed. How could I do that? Everyone holds various pieces of misinformation at every point in their lives, myself included. you only try to make it appear normal by saying that the PBS/NPR audience is equally as misinformed, of which you have no proof whatsoever... It is normal. And the PBS/NPR crowd is as misinformed -- given the right set of questions. The e-mail writer proposed four that he felt would lead to a reverse result. I added another. Given time, I'm sure he and I and even you could come up with others, but why bother? -- as I said already to EchoVortex, no polling organization will ever run them, therefore there is no way of proving it. Of course, there is no way of proving -- by the only standards you will accept -- that "the rest of the world" disapproved of the Iraqi invasion either, so why pursue it further? actually, I do read the Wall Street Journal and Businessweek magazine and National Review and I even watch FOX news sometimes (for laughs). I don't doubt you do. Would you consider them your primary source of news? Re-read my original statement, paying particular attention to the clause "compared to the amount of time you spend reading op-ed pieces from more liberal sources." and I also read op-ed pieces from so called "liberal sources" like TIME magazine, the Washington Post, NY Times and LA Times. and having seen bias on both sides, I can unequivacally say that FOX news is by far the most biased major news organization in the US. So you are saying FOX News broadcasts untruths? FOX says the WMD have been found in Iraq? FOX says people in other countries approve of the invasion? FOX says there was a close working relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda? Links, please. You seem to have faith in properly run telephone polls. You must be aware then that more than three times as many Americans say the news media has too much liberal bias than those who say it has too much conservative bias, and that these figures have scarcely changed over the last three years. An excerpt from http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr031008.asp -- "Forty-five percent of Americans believe the news media in this country are too liberal, while only 14% say the news media are too conservative. These perceptions of liberal inclination have not changed over the last three years. A majority of Americans who describe their political views as conservative perceive liberal leanings in the media, while only about a third of self-described liberals perceive conservative leanings. "More generally, the Sept. 8-10 Gallup Poll finds that a little more than half of Americans have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the news media when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly. Trust in the news media has not changed significantly over the last six years. Conservatives have a slightly lower level of trust in the media than either moderates or liberals do." I respect your right to give your opinion about the bias in FOX News, by the way -- even if it is a minority opinion. I merely point out that your opinion doesn't change the bad methodology used by Myerson. let's set this ridiculous argument of causality aside for a minute because it's impossible to prove either way. There is nothing "ridiculous" about it at all -- it is the entire premise behind Myerson's screed. I agree it is impossible to prove either way, but that is not what Myerson claims. He claims there is a causal relationship. I pointed out that Myerson is incorrect. the fact remains that FOX news viewers are more misinformed. On those specific three questions, it can be argued that FOX viewers are more misinformed -- or not, depending on what standards one applies to determine the proof of the answers. See my above comments re phrasing and the acceptance of "everyone knows" rather than actual polls to validate the truth. I still say a different set of questions would yield different results, and you seem to believe the results would be identical no matter what questions are asked. In the absence of further polls, we'll never know for sure, so there is no point either of us continuing to repeat ourselves. I say let the readers of this thread make up their own minds as to which scenario is more likely. pinky
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Fred's son Registered: 10/18/00 Posts: 12,949 Loc: Dominican Republ Last seen: 9 years, 17 days |
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pinky writes:
"I am not "defending" FOX News" infidelGOD asks: "oh you're not?" No, I'm not. You seem to be forgetting something here -- on this particular issue I have the advantage of operating from a position of complete neutrality in that I watch none of the networks mentioned in the survey, and haven't in sixteen years. The only time I watch TV news at all is the very occasional Dominican Republic newscast, and the odd CBC news program during the few weeks each year that I am in Canada. I haven't the faintest conception from personal experience how biased any of the news programs may be -- I lack the necessary evidence of my own senses to come to any conclusion at all on the matter. From the descriptions provided in this forum of various FOX political commentators I suspect I would find more points of agreement with some of their opinions than I would with the opinions of Peter Jennings, for example (I mention Peter Jennings because I used to watch him when he and I were both still Canadian, so I know quite a bit about his political bent), but in the case of the actual news presented by any of the networks I am completely ignorant. I have no personal axe to grind. For all I know, every damn one of them is inaccurate as hell. I have never heard Rush Limbaugh on the radio, or seen him on TV. Or Anne Coulter or Sean Hannity or Michael O'Reilly or Connie Chung or anyone other than the Sixty Minutes gang. Oh, and I have seen Barbara Walters and Dianne Sawyer a few times. Therefore, I am forced to evaluate the information (and lack thereof) presented by Myerson with no preconceived ideas of favoritism one way or the other. But I do know enough to be able to say with complete confidence that the premise Myerson is stating is flawed. Given the information in his article, no reputable statistician or social scientist would have any confidence whatsoever in the validity of Myerson's conclusion -- there is simply not enough data to establish a causal relationship. pinky
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(hard) member Registered: 02/06/02 Posts: 859 Last seen: 15 years, 4 months |
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Fred's son Registered: 10/18/00 Posts: 12,949 Loc: Dominican Republ Last seen: 9 years, 17 days |
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Thanks for finding that.
After reading the questionnaire, I rest my case. pinky
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(hard) member Registered: 02/06/02 Posts: 859 Last seen: 15 years, 4 months |
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Quote: Without stating what, specifically, is wrong with the questionnaire, you have no case.
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(hard) member Registered: 02/06/02 Posts: 859 Last seen: 15 years, 4 months |
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You seem to be forgetting something here -- on this particular issue I have the advantage of operating from a position of complete neutrality in that I watch none of the networks mentioned in the survey, and haven't in sixteen years.
Hearing you say that you're "operating from a position of complete neutrality" is about as humorous as hearing Fox News call themselves "fair and balanced." You know that Fox News is right-wing and you yourself have admitting to agreeing with their commentators more often than those of mainstream news outlets. You also know that PBS/NPR viewers tend towards the liberal end of the spectrum. That's all you NEED to know for the possibility of bias creeping in--actually watching the broadcasts is not necessary. Given the information in his article, no reputable statistician or social scientist would have any confidence whatsoever in the validity of Myerson's conclusion -- there is simply not enough data to establish a causal relationship. You have yet to address the fact that the more attention a Fox viewer paid to the news, the more likely he was to get the facts wrong. Here is the relevant quotation from the report: "Among Fox viewers who did not follow the news at all closely, 22% had this misperception, jumping to 34% and 32% among those who followed the news not very and somewhat closely respectively, and then jumping even higher to 44% among those who followed the news very closely." Now, let us assume for a second that Fox is reporting unvarnished fact and nothing but. Logic would dictate that the more attention the viewer paid to those facts, the more likely he would be to get those facts right. Yet in the case of Fox, the more attention the viewer pays to what is being broadcast, the more likely he is to get the facts wrong. Generally speaking, the only information that makes you more wrong the more you pay attention to it, is wrong information. Or misinformation. Or distorted information, like that Saddam statue video which you conveniently tried to brush under the rug as being normal practice. Please explain how it is possible that Fox viewers get the facts wrong more often the more closely they attend to the news. Do Fox viewers in general have some sort of neurological dysfunction that actually makes them process sensory stimuli and incoming information less accurately the more they pay attention to it? If so, I suggest you send your findings to the New England Journal of Medicine, because you have made medical history.
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synchronicitycir Registered: 07/15/03 Posts: 1,241 Loc: the brainforest |
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Quote: I do not recall anyone saying the cameramen and editors themselves purposefully staged the statue-toppling as you seem to insist. Rather, it seems to have been the US military under direction of the Pentagon/State Department/Bush Administration that flew in a rag-tag band of pro-US Iraqis and mercenaries and brought them to the location of the statue. The entire square was sealed off by the Marines. The statue was then pulled down and these men danced and cheered. Two versions of the edited recordings exist: one set that shows wide angles and aerial shots (from the Palastine Hotel) of the few dozen mercenaries/US soliders/US agents/pro-US Iraqis and the other with narrow angles and close-ups of these men cheering. Non-US/non-corporate news agencies seem have shown the version of wide angles, while news outlets like Faux News chose the narrow angle version and added their soundbyte: "The Iraqi people welcome the liberators and tear down the statue in joy." Why would the US government stage such an event? Symbolic reasons to signal "the end of major combat." The toppling of the Saddam statue was a matter of picture-friendly postcard Psy-Ops. Any military would have done the same. -------------------- As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know. -Donald Rumsfeld 2/2/02 Pentagon
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illusion ![]() Registered: 04/18/02 Posts: 3,040 Loc: there |
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That cuts both ways. We don't know the exact phrasing of the questions (or even the number of questions) asked in the survey mentioned by Myerson
well now we know what the exact phrasing and methodology was. do you have the same information on the polls out of Iraq? If it is correct for you to say it is a fact that the rest of the world disapproved -- with no poll results (incomplete or otherwise) at all to back you up -- then using the exact same standards as you, it is correct to say the Iraqis approved. I don't have to rely on polls to tell me that the world was opposed. you even agree that the world was opposed, so how did you come to this conclusion without any polls? could it be that you actually used logic and common sense? without having to post polls from dozens of countries, can we do the same here? try to follow along: if large numbers of people in countries that supported the war (like Great Britain and Japan) were opposed to the war, then doesn't it follow logically that in the countries that actually opposed the war, the precentage of people opposing the war would be far greater? don't call it a fact if you don't want to, just call it common knowledge. and if you believe that there was worldwide support for the war, "misinformed" is truly the right word for you here. on the other hand, if you want believe that the majority of Iraqis supported the invasion, you would have to rely entirely on these polls coming out a war zone. I don't know if I could trust these polls without seeing the exact phrasing and methodology. I haven't even seen any of these polls you speak of, so I certainly wouldn't take them as fact or common knowledge. whether or not the Iraqis supported the war is simply unknown at this point. And you seem to have no trouble swallowing non-existent polls. what "non-existent" poll are you speaking of? it's ironic since your whole argument rests on this hypothetical poll of PBS viewers How do we know this is an "obvious fact"? In the absence of rigorous polls we know no such thing. not having had a TV for sixteen years, I understand if you are a little bit out of touch on this, but we can "know" things without relying on rigorous polls. anyone who has followed the news in the last six months would "know" that most of the world was opposed to the war. I understand, since you rely entirely on the internet and print media for your news, you haven't been introduced to the wonders of telecommunications in modern America. you're ignoring the fact that it's the primary source of news for most Americans (unfortunately). if you haven't had a TV in sixteen years, I don't imagine you're too media savvy and I'm afraid you are working with imcomplete information... like you said: "I lack the necessary evidence of my own senses to come to any conclusion at all on the matter" You have a choice here -- either admit the original question asked cannot be answered yes or no, or admit that the question about Iraqis can also be answered yes or no. You can't have it both ways. both questions can be answered yes or no. but to answer the second one, you will be relying entirely on polls coming out of a war zone. to answer the first one, you only need to use a bit of common sense and logic. As it happens, I personally think most of the world was opposed, but that doesn't make it fact -- by the standards you and EchoVortex insist on applying to the question of Iraqi approval. actually, I don't take any poll as fact. this is precisely what you've done on the question of Iraqi approval because you have only the polls from Iraq to go by. as for the question of world approval, there are polls, but more importantly, there are statements from the countries themselves opposing the war. there was the UN non-vote. there is the fact that there was massive opposition even within the coalition. this can all be taken as evidence that the majority of the world was opposed. you don't have to take it as fact but anyone who has been out in the real world, immersed in the media would "know" that the majority of the world was against it. why do you suppose the resolution sought by the US after 1441 never came to a vote? Can you not remember the news reports you read even six months ago? Yet another illustration of a non-FOX News viewer getting things wrong. The reason they never bothered to vote on it was because France made it clear in no uncertain terms that they would veto the resolution regardless of how many others favored it. yeah it wasn't that long ago, so you should have no trouble remembering that Frace was hardly the only country to be opposed to it. Russia, China, Germany were also opposed to name a few. Incorrect. All the questions are in the same category. All of them have to day with the "major news events" (in this case events leading up to the invasion of Iraq) the survey purported to address. this is where you (and the email author) go wrong. the emailer makes a flawed assumption that his questions are equivalent to the ones in the original poll. most of his questions are asking for opinions. think about it. when you ask someone if the toppling of the statue was staged, you are asking them for their opinion - you are asking for their interpretation of the event. when you ask them if WMD have been found in Iraq, you are testing them on their knowledge of FACTS. lets not apply the "same standards" to two fundamentally different questions. I mean, sure you can use that question in a poll, but it would only be an opinion poll. I know that to you, certain opinions will always be wrong. you could say "it wasn't staged, it happened!" all you want, but it doesn't make it fact. people have different interpretations of the event. different opinions. there can't be a "correct" answer, unless you're saying that there is a "correct" interpretation of the event. this question does not determine how misinformed someone is, it only determines how people saw the event. there is no right answer. and if you think that it wasn't staged, because it really "happened", you're completely missing the point, the version that was shown on TV here in the US was produced for public effect, it wasn't a complete fabrication, just some creative cropping and cutting for effect. but I guess since you haven't had a TV in a while, you wouldn't really know what was shown and wouldn't really know how staged it was. yet you are absolutely convinced that it wasn't staged, based on things you've read on the internet, I presume. I have pointed out they do. At least two -- the question of how many opposed the invasion and the question of how close the relationship between the Ba'athist regime and al Qaeda operatives really was -- are indeed open to interpretation. and I have pointed out how absurd it is to open those questions to interpretation. you refuse to see that these questions are fundamentally different from the ones the emailer asks. like you said, look at them objectively. they specifically test people on what they know. let's go through them again, in the original form: 1. Since the war with Iraq ended, is it your impression that the US has or has not found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? if it is their "impression" that WMD have been found in Iraq, they would simply be wrong. I don't see how any interpretation of this question can change that. 2. Is it your impression that the US has or has not found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the Al Qaeda terrorist organization? sure, you could argue that some documents found in Iraq means there was a close relationship, but any reasonable person would conclude that there isn't enough evidence there. if you answer in the positive, you might not have a high standard of evidence, or you may just be misinformed. 3. Thinking about how all the people in the world feel about the US having gone to war with Iraq, do you think: this question does have some wiggle room, but if people got the impression that "The majority of people favor the US having gone to war" as 25% of the respondants did, they are either misinformed, or they weren't paying attention or they're waiting for poll results to come in from 180 countries... surely you can see the difference here. By the standards you yourself apply, no I can't. well then I think you're letting your prejudice show. these questions are clealy different. the emailer's questions mostly ask for people's opinions. of course, his point is that the PBS audience would have the "wrong" opinions on those questions and would therefor be as "misinformed" as FOX news viewers, but I think the more appropriate word here would be "mis-opinioned". Yeah you are. You are saying that no polls at all trump the Iraqi polls, and you are saying that in the "imminent threat" question we must allow some wiggle room for interpretation but must allow none in the "close working" relationship. If that isn't different standards, what is? this may come as a shock to you, but there are different schools of thought on these things. things are not so black and white as you see them. there is some debate as to whether the Bush administration tried to portray Iraq as an imminent threat. there are people of different opinions on this matter. so if I answer "yes, I believe that the Bush administration claimed that Iraq was an imminent threat", this is not an "incorrect" opinion. and since you haven't had a TV in sixteen years, I don't think you really understand the relationship between the government and the media in 21st century America, and how TV plays a huge role in the government getting it's message out to the people. most people in this country rely on TV for their news, so if you didn't have access to one, you wouldn't really know how Iraq was portrayed before the war now would you? let me get back to what you said which I think is appropriate here: "I lack the necessary evidence of my own senses to come to any conclusion at all on the matter"... the bottom line is that this question is open to legitimate debate. don't make the mistake of thinking that only certain opinions are the correct ones, that's rather close-minded of you. there is no wrong answer here. now I know that you'll say the same thing about the question of Iraq and al qaida having a close working relationship, that it is also open to different opinions, but again, you are applying your "same standards" to different things, there is virtually no debate on this question. even the most hardcore neocons don't make this claim of a close working relationship anymore because the evidence simply doesn't support it. if you want to hold on to the view that there was a close working relationship, you are either misinformed or you want to believe it. if there is no debate, and it is agreed by almost everyone that there was no close working relationship, and you still get this one wrong, as 48% of FOX news viewers did, I'm afraid you are simply misinformed do you really think that a PBS viewer who believes that the statue scene was staged is as "wrong" as a FOX news viewer who believes that we found WMD in Iraq? As EchoVortex points out, we are deciding issues of fact here. There are no degrees to it, it is either wrong or not. and my point was that the question of whether the statue scene was staged isn't a question of fact, it's a question of interpretation. the same can't be said of the question about the WMD in Iraq. THAT is a question of fact. again I see that you either can't see the difference here, or you're willfully ignoring it because it pretty much destroys your argument. it is your contention that PBS viewers would be as "misinformed" as FOX news viewer if given these questions in a hypothetical poll. ignoring for a minute that your whole argument rests on these non-existent polls, why not examine these questions more carefully? look at them objectively and you'll see that they aren't of the same variety. the emailer asks for opinions to try to prove that PBS viewers are misinformed on facts. see the logical flaw there? And I would still like to hear your explanation of how no polls at all can "be taken as an accurate representation of the whole". and I would like you to tell me where exactly I said such a thing now you're setting the condition that it actually has to be used for it to be significant? Nope. I gave about five different criteria -- by tonnage, by dollar amount, by percentage of total arsenal, by kill potential, by actual use. You can repeat this till you are blue in the face, but it doesn't change facts -- the anthrax cultures Iraq obtained were not a significant amount by any measure of Iraq's weaponry. that's a fact to you. but again you have trouble grasping that people might have different opinions on this. I think it can be argued that selling precursors to biological weapons can be considered a sale of a significant amount of arms. that's not so unreasonable is it? I'm not claiming anything as fact, as you are. what I'm saying is that there can be legitimate debate about this question. once people have the facts, they can form their own opinions on whether the sale of anthrax constituted a "significant amount". all I'm saying is that it can be considered a sale of a significant amount of arms... A significant amount by what measure? By dollar amount? By tonnage? By kill potential? By percentage of total arsenal? By actual use? if it isn't already obvious, I'm saying it was a significant amount by kill potential, not tonnage, or actual usage or any other criteria that you decided to apply. No, it wasn't "staged". They didn't cause the event to happen. Get it now? yawn. it must be great to have things so black and white. to you it's a fact that the scene wasn't staged. can you just make a little room in your mind for the possibility that other people might hold different opinions on this? I'm not saying that it's a fact that the scene was staged. all I'm saying is that there are different interpretations of the event. it is your opinion that it wasn't staged. many people think otherwise. asking if the scene was staged doesn't tell you if someone is misinformed because it's not dealing with fact, it only tells you how they interpreted the event. you have to admit that these are really poor questions posed by the emailer. this kind of stuff belongs in an opinion poll, to find out how people saw things, not to find out how misinformed they are. Maybe there really were just three questions asked about one of the major news events -- the invasion of Iraq -- in which case the survey was clearly a piece of crap, but let's move on anyway. How many questions were asked about the other major news events, and why do we have no commentary on the results of those questions? now we know that there were other questions. does that invalidate the findings for you? polls generally aren't taken with just three questions so it's a given that there would be others, a lot of them deal with people's opinions, such as "Do you favor or oppose the US going to war with Iraq?" but the three questions in the article are questions that test what people know about the war. at least there is a poll, along with the polling methodology and the exact phrasing of the questions. all you have to go on is a hypothetical poll from an anonymous emailer, with some sloppy questions asking people for their opinions, and trying to determine how "misinformed" they are based on the answers given. you haven't given a shred of evidence to prove your point that PBS viewers are as misinformed as FOX news viewers. you made that assertion so the burden of proof is on you. And the PBS/NPR crowd is as misinformed -- given the right set of questions. prove this please. So you are saying FOX News broadcasts untruths? FOX says the WMD have been found in Iraq? FOX says people in other countries approve of the invasion? FOX says there was a close working relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda? no that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that FOX news is biased. they don't blatantly lie of course, but much of FOX news is actually commentary, where the bias comes in. but of course, having never seen FOX news, you wouldn't know that. Links, please. oh great, let's beat each other over the head with links now. it seems to be your preferred method of operation. I normally don't ask for links but maybe first you should provide me with links proving that "the PBS/NPR crowd is as misinformed". that is your argument isn't it? have any evidence to back it up or is it just more useless speculation? You must be aware then that more than three times as many Americans say the news media has too much liberal bias than those who say it has too much conservative bias, and that these figures have scarcely changed over the last three years ah, thanks for bringing this up. here's another example of what I'm talking about. when you ask people about bias in the media, you are asking for their opinions. this is an opinion poll. there will be a variety of answers but no "right" answer. see how that works? let's set this ridiculous argument of causality aside for a minute because it's impossible to prove either way. There is nothing "ridiculous" about it at all -- it is the entire premise behind Myerson's screed. I agree it is impossible to prove either way, but that is not what Myerson claims. He claims there is a causal relationship. I pointed out that Myerson is incorrect. can you tell me where he claimed there was causality? maybe you misread this sentence: "The more you watch, the more you'll get things wrong." this just sounds like he's reporting the findings of the poll, which showed exactly that. he doesn't say that watching FOX news caused those misperceptions. or maybe you took his "flight of fancy" a little too seriously. either way, he's simply reporting the results and speculating. causality certainly isn't "the entire premise behind Myerson's screed". maybe you hold some misperceptions on his article... I still say a different set of questions would yield different results proof please and you seem to believe the results would be identical no matter what questions are asked. not at all. maybe you skimmed what I said earlier but I said that liberals hold some misperceptions of their own. my contention is the same as the original article's - that FOX news viewers are the most misinformed. if you want to dispute this with facts, go ahead, but we could do without useless speculation on how PBS viewers would answer a hypothetical poll. on this particular issue I have the advantage of operating from a position of complete neutrality in that I watch none of the networks mentioned in the survey, and haven't in sixteen years. you call that neutrality? I call it operating from a position of complete ignorance. you haven't had TV in sixteen years, yet you feel qualified to speak about bias in the media, based on what? what you read on the internet? and you feel qualified to talk about "standard techniques used by just about every news segment producer in the world"? you certaintly write as if you know what you're talking about. from what I've read I would have thought that you were completely immersed in American media and that you know a great deal about how the media works, but I wonder just how much you've missed in these last sixteen years. no offence man, but living in the Dominican, without a TV for the last sixteen years, you don't exactly have your finger on the pulse of America. and you wouldn't really know how Iraq was portrayed by the administration, or how the statue scene was portrayed. but you seem absolutely convinced that you have the "correct" version of things. I find that very interesting. but in the case of the actual news presented by any of the networks I am completely ignorant. if you rely on the print media and the internet for all your news, your view of the world may be a little bit incomplete, or at the very least, your views on American media may not be entirely accurate. don't underestimate the huge role TV plays in shaping public opinion in the US. I'm not saying that TV news is good, but it's what you have to deal with because most Americans get their news from the TV, so if you're not at least familiar with it, you are missing a big piece of the puzzle. But I do know enough to be able to say with complete confidence that the premise Myerson is stating is flawed what premise would that be? if you don't agree with his premise, do you agree with the results of the poll? it appears that you do, since you attempted to make it appear normal by saying that PBS viewers are also misinformed. but you haven't provided any evidence for it, just more word games. why not attempt to clearly lay out your case and try to prove it? upon closer examination I see that it's a pretty thin case you have there with absolutely no evidence to back it up. and remember that the burden of proof is on you. the original poll proves that FOX news viewers are misinformed, at least on those questions. you asserted that PBS viewers would be equally misinformed, if given a different set of questions. you have no evidence for this of course, only your own speculation based on imcomplete information. I'd be happy to continue this debate if you had anything more substantial to offer, besides your ridiculous insistence on applying the "same standards" to everything, regardless of the context, and your stubborn contention that those four questions from the emailer all have "correct" answers, when they would clearly elicit people's opinions and their interpretations of events. I don't see what else you have to go on. speculation is fine and all, but if you're going to insist on the highest standards of evidence from others, you have to be a little more forthcoming with some evidence of your own. you already changed the terms of this debate from "PBS viewers are as misinformed as FOX news viewers" which you couldn't prove, to "there is no causality, FOX news doesn't cause people to be misinformed", which is pretty much unprovable. how convenient. in any case, whatever your argument, you have no proof of anything, only empty speculation about how people would answer a hypothetical poll. when it comes down to it, there really isn't much to argue about. you posted an email that was complete nonsense and I don't think you really examined it carefully. when the emailer says: "imagine an opposite poll", he makes the flawed assumption that his questions are equivalent to the ones in the original poll. clearly this is not the case. he asks questions which would elicit opinions and tries to say that people with the "wrong" opinions are misinformed. this is some sloppy logic don't you think? your whole case rests on some seriously flawed assuptions and you just need to rethink the whole thing and look at it more objectively. those seven questions are not all the same. if you didn't have any preconceptions about this, you would see that.
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Fred's son Registered: 10/18/00 Posts: 12,949 Loc: Dominican Republ Last seen: 9 years, 17 days |
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Xochitl writes:
Rather, it seems to have been the US military under direction of the Pentagon/State Department/Bush Administration that flew in a rag-tag band of pro-US Iraqis and mercenaries and brought them to the location of the statue. You've been out of the loop. That theory was debunked months ago. It is however true that there were not a lot of people in the plaza. pinky
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Fred's son Registered: 10/18/00 Posts: 12,949 Loc: Dominican Republ Last seen: 9 years, 17 days |
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Let me preface this by saying that for the last couple of days both the electrical grid and the telecom in my beautiful third-world country have been even shittier than usual, so I won't have time to address your post (and EchoVortex's) in one chunk. I'll type till the already partially depleted battery in this borrowed laptop gets low, then try to connect to the Net to send it. I will eventually address all the points each of you raised, it just might take a few days.
infidelGOD writes: well now we know what the exact phrasing and methodology was. Yes, we do. I find this preamble to be particularly relevant to the point I was making about phrasing being all-important: Quote: The instructions did not read (as just one example of an alternate phrasing): "Here are some statements which may be true or may be false. Please indicate to the best of your knowledge the ones you know to be true." How much more plainly can the pollsters emphasize they are not asking for a rigorous examination of personal certainties? Hell, they are not even coming close to asking for a judgment on truth or falsehood -- it's almost the same instructions a psychiatrist gives you at the beginning of one of those word-association psychological tests where he says, "I'm gonna say a word and I want you to answer me with another word -- the first one that pops into your head.". Not only that, but the instructions go even further -- they politely ask (at least they said "please") the respondents to respond to things they may not even know about. They are bending over backwards to say that it doesn't matter whether the respondents even know anything about the issue or not -- all that matters is that they give a response. Note that there is not even the option to reply "I don't know", or "I'm not sure," or "I have no opinion," or "none of the above" -- the only option left to those respondents unwilling to commit themselves was to skip the question. And you will notice that some did just that. Clearly this questionnaire was not designed to ascertain the level of factual knowledge the respondents held on various aspects of the Iraq invasion. As a side note, that's another thing Myerson got wrong -- the questionnaire was not about "major news events", it was about the invasion of Iraq and people's attitudes towards it. No other major news events were mentioned. Once you read the full report, you can see what the goal of the designers of the poll was -- to demonstrate their premise that since anyone who favored invading Iraq was clearly in the wrong, the only reason someone would actually favor it was because he got his facts wrong. Their premise is (in a nutshell) -- "if only you knew all the facts, you would be in agreement with us: invading Iraq was wrong". They then go on to analyze the data to demonstrate their point -- the greater the "misperception" (and note the immediate substitute of "misperception" for the more accurate "impression") in a given group, the higher the likelihood that group supported the invasion. Once again, they (deliberately or otherwise) feel that this "arrow of causality" can only work in one direction -- you are mistaken about certain points, therefore you support the invasion. It never occurs to them that the reverse is equally likely -- you have made up your mind that the invasion is the right thing to do, therefore your impression of certain points is shaded by your prior conviction. Remember, we are talking about impressions here -- even impressions about things of which you may admittedly have no knowledge at all. A final fact about methodology for you to ponder -- Quote: percentage of PBS viewers combined with NPR viewers-- 3% So the entire PBS/NPR crowd combined is 40 people (do the math yourself if you don't trust me), and falls within the range of statistical "noise" in any event. do you have the same information on the polls out of Iraq? No. But I can't read Arabic anyway, so I don't imagine it would help me much to see the questions. *grin* As for methodology, the pollsters would use the same methodology they normally would, except in the selection of the respondents in the Baghdad poll. I don't have to rely on polls to tell me that the world was opposed. you even agree that the world was opposed, so how did you come to this conclusion without any polls? could it be that you actually used logic and common sense? Without having to post polls from dozens of countries, can we do the same here? And I don't need the Iraq polls to confirm what I already know -- that the Iraqis are in favor. I used logic and common sense as well as reports from liberated Iraqis. You can't seriously believe the majority of Iraqis opposed being set free. try to follow along: if large numbers of people in countries that supported the war (like Great Britain and Japan) were opposed to the war, then doesn't it follow logically that in the countries that actually opposed the war, the precentage of people opposing the war would be far greater? Of course it logically follows. It's just that I have never seen a list of how many of the 190 (I was wrong about the earlier 180 number) countries in the world opposed it. To date, the largest number of countries where we can actually check "opposed" and "in favor" is the Gallup poll included in one of EchoVortex's links which totalled something like 62 countries -- roughly a third of the total. don't call it a fact if you don't want to, just call it common knowledge. But it isn't common knowledge. That's my entire point. I know of nowhere on the Net where one can find such information -- nowhere. In my opinion, the majority of the world probably did oppose the invasion -- but you have already demonstrated that my opinion means exactly zero to you. I will admit that when I looked at the list of countries EchoVortex's link provided, there were some surprises for me. There were several countries in favor of the invasion which I would never have guessed would support it. As well, there were a few I had thought would support it who didn't. You should check it out -- I'll bet there'll be a few surprises for you, too. and if you believe that there was worldwide support for the war, "misinformed" is truly the right word for you here. But I don't believe that. I have already told you the reverse. The point is that I don't know that, and neither do you. The thing is, by your own standards, my beliefs are worthless -- unless they happen to coincide with your own. If they differ, then I am required to provide proof -- i.e. the validity of the polls held in Iraq. You can't have it both ways. on the other hand, if you want believe that the majority of Iraqis supported the invasion, you would have to rely entirely on these polls coming out a war zone. See what I mean? There you go again. You would certainly not have to rely solely on those polls. I knew (through common sense) before the polls were released that the majority support it. The polls confirmed it. I haven't even seen any of these polls you speak of, so I certainly wouldn't take them as fact or common knowledge. Then even though I haven't had a television for sixteen years, I am ahead of you on this point at least. Gotta love the Net. Links to all the polls have been posted in this forum already (not by me). I first came across them on either Reuters or Yahoo or ABCNews.com -- might have been CBC.ca, though. I can't remember which now. whether or not the Iraqis supported the war is simply unknown at this point. Whether or not the inhabitants of the other 120 plus countries in the world (for which we haven't yet seen any info) supported the war is simply unknown at this point. You can't say that because we know Nigeria supported the invasion we also know that Djibouti did. It doesn't work that way, as a look at the info in EchoVortex's link will show. Check it out yourself -- there are some surprises in there. The battery on this laptop is just about dead, so I'll post this bit now. I will address the rest of your (and EchoVortex's) post when I can. pinky
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synchronicitycir Registered: 07/15/03 Posts: 1,241 Loc: the brainforest |
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Quote: Please provide info/sources of this "debunking." Thanks. -------------------- As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know. -Donald Rumsfeld 2/2/02 Pentagon
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(hard) member Registered: 02/06/02 Posts: 859 Last seen: 15 years, 4 months |
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How much more plainly can the pollsters emphasize they are not asking for a rigorous examination of personal certainties? Hell, they are not even coming close to asking for a judgment on truth or falsehood -- it's almost the same instructions a psychiatrist gives you at the beginning of one of those word-association psychological tests where he says, "I'm gonna say a word and I want you to answer me with another word -- the first one that pops into your head.".
Now you're trying to portray the questionnaire as being, or trying to be, nothing more than a Rorschrach test or some exercise in free association. When the pollsters use the word "impression" they are not asking the people being polled simply to give "free associations": I say Saddam, you say WMD. That's got to be the most convoluted interpretation of those questions I can imagine. Whether the respondent knows with certainty a position to be absolutely true or not is not what the pollsters want to know: they want to know what the respondents perceive reality to be. A subtle difference, and one apparently lost on you. Not only that, but the instructions go even further -- they politely ask (at least they said "please") the respondents to respond to things they may not even know about. They are bending over backwards to say that it doesn't matter whether the respondents even know anything about the issue or not -- all that matters is that they give a response. Note that there is not even the option to reply "I don't know", or "I'm not sure," or "I have no opinion," or "none of the above" -- the only option left to those respondents unwilling to commit themselves was to skip the question. And you will notice that some did just that. Yes, which shows that respondents were free not to respond if they had no clue. They had that right, they knew it, and many of them exercised it. So what's the problem? Clearly this questionnaire was not designed to ascertain the level of factual knowledge the respondents held on various aspects of the Iraq invasion. So are you contending that if the preamble to the questionnaire had been "Here are some statements which may be true or may be false. Please indicate to the best of your knowledge the ones you know to be true," then the results would have been wildly different from what they were? So much so that the NPR/PBS crowd would have been wrong just as or more often than the Fox crowd? That's a huge leap of faith . . . er, I mean, logic, if you ask me. A final fact about methodology for you to ponder -- Quote: margin of error -- plus/minus 2% to 3.5% percentage of PBS viewers combined with NPR viewers-- 3% So the entire PBS/NPR crowd combined is 40 people (do the math yourself if you don't trust me), and falls within the range of statistical "noise" in any event. Uh, sorry, but your interpretation of the statistical data is completely wrong. Margin of error means that any percentage quoted could actually fall within a range of points around the number given. So, for example, the percentage of Fox viewers who believed the three incorrect pieces of information was given at 45%. The actual number, given the margin of error, is anywhere from 41.5% to 48.5%. See here for a definition of margin of error. However, that margin of error does not apply to the percentage of people claiming to use of a particular news outlet as their main news sources. If 3% of the respondents use PBS/NPR, then three percent of the respondents use PBS/NPR. The question would be whether 3% of the population as a whole (the population the poll is supposed to represent) uses PBS/NPR. According to the margin of error, the possible percentage of the population who uses PBS/NPR ranges from -0.5% (an obvious impossiblility)to 6.5% percent. That is all that the margin of error implies, and it does nothing to change the fact that the PBS/NPR respondents got the questions wrong FAR less often than FOX viewers--by a statistical spread more than wide enough to be statistically significant. Finally, the sample in question (June to September) for which we are given data on what percentage uses PBS/NPR is composed of 3334 people. 3% of 3334 amounts to 100 people, not 40 as you claim. So yes, I did the math myself, and it turned out that I had very good reason not to trust you, just as I have very good reasons not to give much credence to your toothless claim that the wording of the questionnaire renders all of its findings invalid across the board. No. But I can't read Arabic anyway, so I don't imagine it would help me much to see the questions. *grin* As for methodology, the pollsters would use the same methodology they normally would, except in the selection of the respondents in the Baghdad poll. I'm sure English translations are available. I've read the methodology for the Baghdad poll conducted by Gallup (see their site: www.gallup.com) and it was nowhere near their own methodology for US polls, not by a long shot. It would be nice, you know, if you actually provided some evidence once in a while to back some up of your claims. I'm getting a bit tired of being the only one here who actually gives a damn about providing evidence instead of mere rhetoric.
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Fred's son Registered: 10/18/00 Posts: 12,949 Loc: Dominican Republ Last seen: 9 years, 17 days |
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EchoVortex writes:
Now you're trying to portray the questionnaire as being, or trying to be, nothing more than a Rorschrach test or some exercise in free association. I didn't say that -- I said the instructions given by PIPA are "almost" like the instructions a psychiatrist gives at the beginning of a word-association test. Whether the respondent knows with certainty a position to be absolutely true or not is not what the pollsters want to know: they want to know what the respondents perceive reality to be. A subtle difference, and one apparently lost on you. If that is not what they wanted to know, then how can you claim the answers to the questions asked demonstrate people believe "facts" which aren't true? They demonstrate no such thing. They merely demonstrate impressions. Yes, which shows that respondents were free not to respond if they had no clue. They had that right, they knew it, and many of them exercised it. So what's the problem? You seem to have no difficulty claiming the government and their willing lackeys in the media use special wording to "manipulate" people into holding false impressions or even into accepting as fact things which are false. Yet you don't see the author's attempt to manipulate people into answering a question on which they may have no knowledge and have no confidence in as relevant. In other polls, there is often a choice such as "none of the above", or "no opinion" or whatever. In this poll not only is there no such option, but the pollsters go out of their way to cajole respondents to answer with no confidence things of which they may have no knowledge. My point is that if they had left out these pleas to "answer no matter what", and especially if they had included the standard "don't know" option, the percentages would have been different. Rather than 35% answering "A", 25% answering "B", 37% answering "C", and 3% deciding against instructions to skip the question, the numbers could have been 28% A, 11% B, 31% C, and 30% "don't know". So are you contending that if the preamble to the questionnaire had been "Here are some statements which may be true or may be false. Please indicate to the best of your knowledge the ones you know to be true," then the results would have been wildly different from what they were? Yep. There is an enormous difference between saying "I get the impression that guy is homosexual" and saying "I know for a fact that guy is a homosexual," or "It is my impression that LSD causes genetic deformities in the children," vs "I know for a fact that LSD users have deformed kids." Even the PIPA people say the same -- "However, it should be noted that when respondents say that something is likely -- especially those who just say that it is somewhat likely -- it does not mean they have come to the conclusion that it is the case." Here we are talking about people who are not even committing themselves to saying it is "somewhat likely", but people who say, "I get the impression that..." So much so that the NPR/PBS crowd would have been wrong just as or more often than the Fox crowd? That's a huge leap of faith . . . er, I mean, logic, if you ask me. First of all, the PBS/NPR crowd is statistically insignificant at a mere 41 people, so all of the conclusions drawn about them are meaningless no matter what form the questions took. Secondly, I didn't say the FOX crowd would outperform the PBS/NPR crowd (or the print media readers) on those three questions, but on the e-mailer's questions. As for believing the phrasing of the questions (or the instructions on how to answer) has no effect on the results, there is no reputable polling organization who would agree with you on that point. Certainly Gallup doesn't. From the Gallup site you linked for us (thanks a lot for the link, by the way) -- "However, when it comes to modern-day attitude surveys conducted by most of the major national polling organizations, question wording is probably the greatest source of bias and error in the data, followed by question order. Writing a clear, unbiased question takes great care and discipline, as well as extensive knowledge about public opinion." "For brand new question areas, Gallup will often test several different wordings. Additionally, it is not uncommon for Gallup to ask several different questions about a content area of interest. Then in the analysis phase of a given survey, Gallup analysts can make note of the way Americans respond to different question wordings, presenting a more complete picture of the population?s underlying attitudes. "Through the years, Gallup has often used a split sample technique to measure the impact of different question wordings. A randomly selected half of a given survey is administered one wording of a question, while the other half is administered the other wording. This allows Gallup to compare the impact of differences in wordings of questions, and often to report out the results of both wordings, allowing those who are looking at the results of the poll to see the impact of nuances in ways of addressing key issues." Margin of error means that any percentage quoted could actually fall within a range of points around the number given. So, for example, the percentage ... (snip)...That is all that the margin of error implies, and it does nothing to change the fact that the PBS/NPR respondents got the questions wrong FAR less often than FOX viewers--by a statistical spread more than wide enough to be statistically significant. You are correct, I phrased that very sloppily indeed. Mea culpa. What I had meant to point out is that in a sample of 1362 people, a swing of 41 people in either direction is ? 3%. The fact that this happens to be the number of combined PBS viewers/NPR listeners is coincidental. Let me try this again -- a sample size of 40 people cannot give you anywhere close to the same degree of accuracy as a sample size of 1362 people. The accuracy of ? 2 to 3.5% is applicable only to the entire group of 1362, not to every smaller subgroup, and certainly not to a subgroup as small as 40 people. I am not a trained statistician, so I don't know exactly how much greater the swing is. Is it unreasonable to assume it would be as much as ? 11%? Or 17%? Or maybe as much as 23%? I don't know. Gallup's example indicates that cutting a group size in half (from 2,000 to 1,000 in their example) increases the error rate by fifty per cent (from ? 2% to ? 3%). I don't know if that ratio is a constant -- I suspect that as the groups get ever smaller, the ratio gets larger. I do know, however, that the accuracy swing on a group of a mere 40 people is sufficiently large as to render the results suspect. If this were not the case, pollsters wouldn't spend the money to poll groups as large as they do -- they'd poll several dozen people rather than a thousand. Even the PIPA pollsters acknowledge this when they explain why they didn't bother to analyze all four original answers to the "al Qaeda linkage" question -- they explain that if they had broken the group down that small they would have had no confidence in the results. And note that the subgroups of all four choices in the "linkage" options were far, far larger than 40 people. This is also why in many of the subdivisions of questions PIPA doesn't mention the PBS/NPR group's results at all. ...it does nothing to change the fact that the PBS/NPR respondents got the questions wrong FAR less often than FOX viewers--by a statistical spread more than wide enough to be statistically significant. You overlook the fact that the error rate in a group of 240 respondents (the FOX group) is substantially less than the error rate in a group of 40 respondents (PBS). So when a FOX result of 32% with an error rate of ?5% (for example) is compared to a PBS answer of 16% with an error rate of ? 11%, statistically speaking the results are identical. Finally, the sample in question (June to September) for which we are given data on what percentage uses PBS/NPR is composed of 3334 people. 3% of 3334 amounts to 100 people, not 40 as you claim. So yes, I did the math myself, and it turned out that I had very good reason not to trust you, just as I have very good reasons not to give much credence to your toothless claim that the wording of the questionnaire renders all of its findings invalid across the board. You are correct that 3% of 3334 is 100. But the analysis of the three key questions wasn't run on 3334 respondents, but on 1362. Three per cent of 1362 is 41 people. I have a hard time accepting that a sample of less than one PBS/NPR person per state is an accurate representation of all the PBS/NPR afficianados in America. I'm sure English translations are available. They are available at Gallup, but only if you buy a one year subscription for $95. They may be available elsewhere for less, or even for free. I sure hope so. I've read the methodology for the Baghdad poll conducted by Gallup (see their site: www.gallup.com) and it was nowhere near their own methodology for US polls, not by a long shot. It would be nice, you know, if you actually provided some evidence once in a while to back some up of your claims. I'm getting a bit tired of being the only one here who actually gives a damn about providing evidence instead of mere rhetoric. Actually, I read the Gallup site too (thanks again for giving us the link) and it turns out their selection of respondents was identical to that used in the US, except that rather than using randomized phone numbers within representative geographical areas, they used randomized addresses. This is exactly the same method they used up until the mid-eighties in the US as well. From the Gallup website -- "By necessity, the earliest polls were conducted in-person, with Gallup interviewers fanning out across the country, knocking on Americans? doors. This was the standard method of interviewing for nearly fifty years, from about 1935 to the mid 1980s, and it was a demonstrably reliable method. Gallup polls across the twelve presidential elections held between 1936 and 1984 were highly accurate, with the average error in Gallup?s final estimate of the election being less than 3 percentage points. "By 1986, a sufficient proportion of American households had at least one telephone to make telephone interviewing a viable and substantially less expensive alternative to the in-person method. And by the end of the 1980s the vast majority of Gallup?s national surveys were being conducted by telephone." So if we are to discard the Baghdad polls as being worthless, clearly we must also discard every single pre-1986 Gallup poll taken in America. Here's what Gallup says about the accuracy of their Baghdad poll -- "The strict, probability-based sample used by Gallup to conduct this survey projects with scientific accuracy to all adults (aged 18 and older) residing in urban areas within the governorate of Baghdad. All 1,178 interviews were conducted face-to-face, in the privacy of the respondent?s own home. "Interviewing was conducted during the period of Aug. 28 through Sept. 4, 2003. The cooperation rate exceeded 97%, that is, fewer than 3% of those we contacted refused to be interviewed. Average interview length was 70 minutes. For results based on this sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum error attributable to sampling and other random effects is ?2.7%." However, if you still wish to claim Gallup's Baghdad poll is invalid, I certainly can't stop you. pinky
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Fred's son Registered: 10/18/00 Posts: 12,949 Loc: Dominican Republ Last seen: 9 years, 17 days |
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Okay. Finally have more or less steady electrical power and am getting kicked off the Net far less frequently. Here is the rest of my response:
infidelGOD writes: what "non-existent" poll are you speaking of? The non-existent poll of the 190 countries in the world. it's ironic since your whole argument rests on this hypothetical poll of PBS viewers The PIPA poll is not hypothetical, it is just statistically meaningless. The three questions in the poll are insufficient to determine a causal relationship. The questions do not try to determine what people believe to be fact. And the sample size of a whopping 40 people (the PBS/NPR crowd used in the subset of the whole) is not statistically representative of PBS/NPR viewers. The PBS/NPR "findings" in the PIPA poll have no more validity than a "hypothetical" one. not having had a TV for sixteen years, I understand if you are a little bit out of touch on this, but we can "know" things without relying on rigorous polls. No, one cannot. One can get impressions. One can form opinions. One can even be willing to bet their entire fortune. But one cannot know how the population of the world feels in every single country in the world without some reliable survey of all of them. anyone who has followed the news in the last six months would "know" that most of the world was opposed to the war. I follow virtually nothing but print (internet) media, and I follow current affairs a lot more closely than the average television watcher does. I know things about current events you don't -- not because I am any more intelligent than you, but simply because due to my passion for politics and the amount of spare time I have. I spend hours each day combing through multiple sources. For example, I have seen all the Iraq polls, you have not. Even the authors of the PIPA study have shown that those who get the majority of their news from print (like me) hold less false impressions than any of the TV watchers. And don't say that the PBS/NPR crowd holds even less, because as I have pointed out already, the PBS/NPR figures are meaningless because the sample size is too small to give reliable indications. Even the authors of the PIPA poll tacitly admit this, since in many of their sub-analyses they don't even mention the PBS crowd -- because it is too small to be subdivided. Yet even with all the searching I do, I don't know (yet) that the majority of the countries in the world opposed the invasion. I strongly suspect that is the case, and I would even be willing to bet on it, but the person who decides the winner of the bet had better be able to provide the actual numbers, not just just say "it's common knowledge, dude -- you lose the bet." I understand, since you rely entirely on the internet and print media for your news, you haven't been introduced to the wonders of telecommunications in modern America. you're ignoring the fact that it's the primary source of news for most Americans (unfortunately). if you haven't had a TV in sixteen years, I don't imagine you're too media savvy and I'm afraid you are working with imcomplete information... like you said: "I lack the necessary evidence of my own senses to come to any conclusion at all on the matter" I do get a chance to watch TV news anywhere from 6 to 8 weeks a year in my visits to Canada, but it is true that even then I spend only maybe two hours a week watching TV news, while I spend more than an hour every day with newspapers. I am not completely ignorant about TV news -- I just find it woefully inadequate for anyone who wishes to get more than a few soundbites on any given topic. I do admit I am completely ignorant about FOX News on TV, though -- I have never seen a single FOX News broadcast, and precious few CNN ones. actually, I don't take any poll as fact. Except, apparently, the PIPA poll which purports to prove that watching FOX News makes you more misinformed than if you didn't. Can we say "double standard"? yeah it wasn't that long ago, so you should have no trouble remembering that Frace was hardly the only country to be opposed to it. Russia, China, Germany were also opposed to name a few. Four out of fifteen of the Security Council members said in advance they would vote against it. One said outright they would veto it no matter what. What about the other eleven? the emailer makes a flawed assumption that his questions are equivalent to the ones in the original poll. most of his questions are asking for opinions. think about it. when you ask someone if the toppling of the statue was staged, you are asking them for their opinion - you are asking for their interpretation of the event. when you ask them if WMD have been found in Iraq, you are testing them on their knowledge of FACTS. Apart from the fact that the PIPA poll was not asking people about facts, or even about opinions for that matter, but about their impressions, to say that most of his questions can't be answered factually is incorrect. For the sake of argument, let's pretend for the next few minutes your take on the toppling statue question is correct. What about the other three? "Did President Bush claim before the war that the threat to the US from Iraq's WMD was imminent?" No, Bush claimed no such thing. That is not opinion, that is fact. You can weasel on for pages and pages about the "mood of the media" or the "interpretation" or "people's impressions", but that doesn't alter the fact that he never claimed it. "Do a majority of Iraqis support the US invasion?" Yes. Not only does every available poll confirm this, so does logic and common sense. "Did the US sell significant amounts of arms to Saddam Hussein?" No. By any measure you care to name, the amount of arms sold to Hussein by the US was not a significant amount. To call an anthrax culture "significant amounts of arms" is ludicrous. The e-mailer's questions are not "fundamentally different" at all. They are -- in the context of misperception or false impression or whatever you want to call it -- fundamentally identical. They all deal with widely-reported and often-discussed aspects of the same meta-topic -- reasons to invade (or not invade) Iraq. and if you think that it wasn't staged, because it really "happened", you're completely missing the point... No. I won't bother repeating this all over again, since you seem honestly incapable of grasping the definition of "staged" provided by your own dictionary. Re-read what I wrote, compare what I said to what the dictionary says about "stage", and if you still disagree with me, so be it. there is some debate as to whether the Bush administration tried to portray Iraq as an imminent threat. There you go again with the "wiggle room" bit. The e-mailer's question did not ask: "Did the Bush administration try to portray Iraq as an imminent threat?" The e-mailer's question was much more narrowly worded, and asked for a judgment of fact, not of opinion -- "Did Bush (not the Bush administration) claim (not try to portray) before the war that the threat to the US was imminent?" Yet you claim that the respondents may properly ignore the question being asked and instead answer one which was not asked. But you adamantly refuse to allow the respondents the same latitude when it comes to the "close working relationship" question. Oh, no! -- there the respondents must stick rigidly and scrupulously to the precise wording of the question when giving their impressions. You claim this is not applying a double standard. Perhaps some of the readers of this thread see otherwise. and since you haven't had a TV in sixteen years, I don't think you really understand the relationship between the government and the media in 21st century America, and how TV plays a huge role in the government getting it's message out to the people. most people in this country rely on TV for their news, so if you didn't have access to one, you wouldn't really know how Iraq was portrayed before the war now would you? let me get back to what you said which I think is appropriate here: "I lack the necessary evidence of my own senses to come to any conclusion at all on the matter"... And, from lower down in the post -- you call that neutrality? I call it operating from a position of complete ignorance. you haven't had TV in sixteen years, yet you feel qualified to speak about bias in the media, based on what? what you read on the internet? For convenience, I will combine the above two comments and address them together below -- Sigh. You still don't get it. I am not commenting on the bias of the media here. I am commenting on the inappropriate conclusions drawn by Myerson. I don't need to know anything at all about FOX News or PBS in order to point out the flaws in the poll. Let me try to explain this. A scientist reading a paper reporting on an experiment or series of experiments may never have seen the phenomenon described in the paper. He need have no prior knowledge on the subject of the experiment in order to judge the validity of the experiment, because he does know experimental techniques, investigational protocols and statistical analysis. He knows about proper design of experiments. This is how bogus scientific papers get exposed, and is the purpose of the "peer review" process. Scientists with a pet theory can unknowingly overlook things in their eagerness to support their theory. Sometimes it is deliberate, more often it is not, but the end result is the same -- faultily designed experiments whose results are misleading or outright false. In this situation I am in the position of the impartial peer reviewing the poll, because I have no axe to grind either way. The PIPA folks are the eager scientists with a pet theory. Your problem is that since you are all too familiar with American TV news and as a human being are subject to the same opinionation all of us are, you have preconceptions which you must set aside or they will get in the way of your objective review. You have seen FOX News, have disdain for it and disdain for the people who watch it, so you are more likely to brush aside my legitimate objections to the faulty methodology because you are not just looking at the report, you are also (unavoidably) subconsciously reviewing a mental image of all the FOX pundits such as Anne Coulter and Bill O'Reilly who set your teeth on edge, and your mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging neighbor who is a rabid Rush Limbaugh fan. I have no such images to set aside -- I have just the poll statistics and the comments of the researchers to go on. You would be in a precisely similar situation if you were reviewing an analogous survey having to do with the -- oh, I don't know -- prevalence of land crab infestation in banana groves in the Dominican Republic. This is a topic on which I would have a very hard time remaining objective because I have a lot of negative experience with it and have my own firm opinions on the matter which I would have difficulty setting aside. I could do it, but it would take effort. You wouldn't even have to expend the effort. Now do you get my point? now I know that you'll say the same thing about the question of Iraq and al qaida having a close working relationship, that it is also open to different opinions...(snip)...you are simply misinformed. The thing is, the PIPA folks go further than saying there was no close working relationship. They deny categorically that there were any links at all, and that is a patently false belief on their part. Here is what they say -- Quote: Clearly the PIPA folks themselves are operating under a misconception, and it has colored their interpretation of the data. There have been plenty of links uncovered and reported. Here are a few articles detailing these links: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=10288 http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/003/033jgqyi.asp http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/238dkpee.asp There are more out there, but these will do for now. and my point was that the question of whether the statue scene was staged isn't a question of fact, it's a question of interpretation. Only if one interpets the dictionary definition of "staged" incorrectly. it is your contention that PBS viewers would be as "misinformed" as FOX news viewer if given these questions in a hypothetical poll. These and others, yes. Especially if the poll was worded identically to the PIPA poll, asking for impressions -- whether they had any confidence in the correctness of the impressions or not; whether they even knew anything about the subject matter or not. look at them objectively and you'll see that they aren't of the same variety. the emailer asks for opinions to try to prove that PBS viewers are misinformed on facts. No he does not ask for opinions. Covered above. You're repeating yourself. I think it can be argued that selling precursors to biological weapons can be considered a sale of a significant amount of arms. An anthrax culture is a "significant amount of arms"? Uh huh. you have to admit that these are really poor questions posed by the emailer. this kind of stuff belongs in an opinion poll, to find out how people saw things, not to find out how misinformed they are. Bingo!!! That's exactly what I am saying about the questions asked by the PIPA people -- "just give us your impressions, please -- don't worry that you may have no confidence in the impression. Hell, don't even worry if you know nothing about it at all -- just give us your impression anyway." Come on, dude! That isn't even an [opinion[/] poll, fa cryin' out loud. now we know that there were other questions. Yes, and they cherry-picked just three out of at least seven questions of "fact" they asked. They don't even show the wording of at least one of the unused questions (the one about the Muslim world). does that invalidate the findings for you? Even more so. I take it you haven't bothered to read the full report yet. If you had, you would be understanding this a whole lot better. no that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that FOX news is biased. And this makes them different from CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC and NPR exactly how? Besides, bias is not the same as inaccurate. I normally don't ask for links but maybe first you should provide me with links proving that "the PBS/NPR crowd is as misinformed". Until PIPA or some other group does a followup poll which consists of more than 40 PBS/NPR respondents, obviously I cannot. can you tell me where he claimed there was causality? maybe you misread this sentence: "The more you watch, the more you'll get things wrong." this just sounds like he's reporting the findings of the poll, which showed exactly that. Incorrect. The actual findings of the poll show the reverse -- the more likely you are to hold a mistaken impression, the higher the chances are that you will watch FOX News. not at all. maybe you skimmed what I said earlier but I said that liberals hold some misperceptions of their own. my contention is the same as the original article's - that FOX news viewers are the most misinformed. Again, that is not what the poll shows. It shows there is a correlation between the likelihood of a person holding false impressions on three carefully selected questions and also being a supporter of the invasion of Iraq. It shows a correlation between the likelihood of a person holding false impressions on three questions and saying they will vote for Bush in the next election. It shows a correlation between the likelihood of a person holding false impressions and being relatively uneducated. It shows a correlation between the likelihood of a person holding false impressions on three questions and watching network news. And of the last correlation, the CBS watchers fared significantly worse than FOX watchers on two questions other than the three selected. Why were not all five questions included, then? Clearly the researchers had the data for all five. Could it be that if all five were included, FOX would come off looking better than with only the three? I leave it to the reader to decide. and you feel qualified to talk about "standard techniques used by just about every news segment producer in the world"? you certaintly write as if you know what you're talking about. from what I've read I would have thought that you were completely immersed in American media and that you know a great deal about how the media works, but I wonder just how much you've missed in these last sixteen years. no offence man, but living in the Dominican, without a TV for the last sixteen years, you don't exactly have your finger on the pulse of America. As I pointed out, I do watch TV for about seven weeks or so each year. And the deliberate selection of camera angles to emphasize or de-emphasize certain things isn't a newly-discovered technique that suddenly came into vogue in the last sixteen years. It has been one of the first things they teach you as a cameraman -- even a still photographer -- for about a century now. and you wouldn't really know how Iraq was portrayed by the administration, or how the statue scene was portrayed. I didn't see it, but I have read seemingly endless critiques of it, seen blurry photoshopped images with no date or time stamp, read endless discussions about it, and as I repeat, I have been involved in similar demonstrations where exactly the same techniques are used. It still doesn't change the fact that it wasn't staged. As for CNN showing nothing but closeups, that's not what some people are saying. Here's just one comment of many from a guy who saw it -- there are dozens of similar threads out there on hundreds of blogs -- http://reason.com/hitandrun/001326.shtml Fyodor, I ended up watching the whole thing live on CNN International. There was no shortage of wide shots of the area and, by my (admittedly amateur) estimate, I'd say the peak crowd was 300-400 (and the average was in the range of 100-200). There certainly wasn't any attempt at deception in the live coverage since the anchors commented on the relatively modest size of the crowd and attributed it to a combination of a) this being a word of mouth gathering in a city with no power, b) sunset was approaching and the people of Baghdad were not unreasonably concerned about being out after dark, and c) there were more than a few ongoing firefights in the city including one at Baghdad University a few miles away (which was covered via split screen much of the time) and a couple of shots fired incidents in the vicinity of the statue which the soldiers periodically reacted to. The charge of deception I guess stems from the close-up shots of the statue falling which appeared later in the day. However, any shot which captured the statue in any detail would necessarily have shown the bulk of the crowd and not the empty square around them. Tom Posted by: Tom on April 15, 2003 12:45 PM but you seem absolutely convinced that you have the "correct" version of things. I find that very interesting. By the commonly accepted definition of "staged" (including the definition you yourself provided), the event wasn't staged. That's all I have ever said. if you rely on the print media and the internet for all your news, your view of the world may be a little bit incomplete... Not according to the PIPA survey. They found the print readers had the most accurate impressions of any group. And I am a print reader. ... or at the very least, your views on American media may not be entirely accurate. Again, I make no judgments on the American media. Why do you have such a hard time grasping this fundamental point? I have always been commenting on the shoddiness of Myerson's article, and now that EchoVortex has provided the link to the actual PIPA survey, on the shoddiness of the survey itself. That survey was never designed to determine which news network is the one most likely to give false impressions -- the poll designer himself says so in so many words. It was not his original intent to discover which one is the shittiest -- it became a secondary "add-on" subtask halfway through the information-gathering process. Perhaps this explains the sloppy work he did in that area. *shrugs* if you don't agree with his premise, do you agree with the results of the poll? I disagree with any attempt to interpret the results of that three question poll as showing that FOX News is more inaccurate a representation of world events than any other US TV news network. the original poll proves that FOX news viewers are misinformed, at least on those questions. Which means exactly doodly squat. I could put together a set of three questions where FOX viewers would do far better. As a matter of fact, the PIPA researchers already did, they just chose not to emphasize the fact. you asserted that PBS viewers would be equally misinformed, if given a different set of questions. Yep. On one of the questions (one of the ones PIPA chose not to include), just 24% of FOX viewers got it wrong. I guarantee I could put together three questions, ask a group of 240 randomly chosen PBS/NPR afficianados (the same number as FOX viewers in the PIPA survey) to just give me their impressions, whether they had any confidence in their answers, whether they knew anything about it or not -- just their impressions -- and get a figure higher than 24% on at least one of them. So could you if you thought about it for a while. You are missing the key point here -- the folks that answered those questions "wrongly" aren't even "misinformed". After all, they weren't asked to pass judgment on the truth or falsehood of an assertion. They were asked to give their impression or something. I hate to point out the obvious, but saying "I get the impression that people who take LSD may give birth to defective children" is not even close to saying "I know for a fact that LSD-eaters have deformed children." Even the PIPA guys admit this. From their report -- "However, it should be noted that when respondents say that something is likely -- especially those who just say that it is somewhat likely -- it does not mean they have come to the conclusion that it is the case." How much plainer can you state it than that? There may be a way to prove that a given US news network (maybe even FOX for all I know) distributes more misinformation than the others, but it certainly cannot be proven with this PIPA survey. That was my contention before ever seeing the survey, just by the limited number of questions asked and the nature of the three questions (all three falling on the same side of the same single issue). Now that I have read through the entire survey a few times, I am even more certain of my original statement -- the conclusions drawn from the add-on part of that specific survey are meaningless. To steal EchoVortex's phrase, excess verbiage, nothing more. pinky
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(hard) member Registered: 02/06/02 Posts: 859 Last seen: 15 years, 4 months |
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If that is not what they wanted to know, then how can you claim the answers to the questions asked demonstrate people believe "facts" which aren't true? They demonstrate no such thing. They merely demonstrate impressions.
As it happens, "impressions" are precisely, and unfortunately, what most voters rely on when deciding to support a policy or elect a candidate. For that reason, impressions are politically significant, and media play a huge role in shaping them. My point is that if they had left out these pleas to "answer no matter what", and especially if they had included the standard "don't know" option, the percentages would have been different. Rather than 35% answering "A", 25% answering "B", 37% answering "C", and 3% deciding against instructions to skip the question, the numbers could have been 28% A, 11% B, 31% C, and 30% "don't know". Yes, it is quite likely that more people would have answered "don't know." But what you are overlooking is that all respondents were given the same instructions, so there is no reason to believe that the ratio of misperceptions (or false impressions, if you prefer) would have been any different. FOX viewers would STILL hold false impressions at a higher percentage than viewers of ABC, CNN, etc. If the pollsters had given those instructions only to the FOX viewers and not to the others, you would have a point. Here we are talking about people who are not even committing themselves to saying it is "somewhat likely", but people who say, "I get the impression that..." Which still doesn't change the fact that people get those impressions from somewhere and that those impressions are politically significant. You seem to have no difficulty claiming the government and their willing lackeys in the media use special wording to "manipulate" people into holding false impressions or even into accepting as fact things which are false. This is just a side note, but it's rather disconcerting to see a self-designated libertarian constantly rushing to the defense of a massive government, especially an administration that has a track record of playing it fast and loose with the facts and rescinding civil liberties. Are you saying the Bush administration is completely trustworthy? Are you saying they never attempt to manipulate people into holding false impressions? "However, when it comes to modern-day attitude surveys conducted by most of the major national polling organizations, question wording is probably the greatest source of bias and error in the data, followed by question order. Writing a clear, unbiased question takes great care and discipline, as well as extensive knowledge about public opinion." You still haven't pointed out any problems in the wording of the questions themselves, only the wording of the instructions. Most of the questions gave respondents a range of choices as to what they thought reality to be. For example, in the al-Qaeda/Saddam link question, here were the choices: Iraq was directly involved in carrying out the September 11th attacks There was no connection at all A few al-Qaeda individuals visited Iraq or had contact with Iraqi officials Iraq gave substantial support to al-Qaeda, but was not involved in the September 11th attacks Despite having four completely distinct choices, 22% of the respondents still went straight for the first option--that Iraq was directly involved in carrying out the attacks--despite the fact that this is the choice that is factually most indefensible. This is not a problem with the question, which gives a range of possibilities, but with the ignorance (or false impressions, if you prefer) of the respondents. You overlook the fact that the error rate in a group of 240 respondents (the FOX group) is substantially less than the error rate in a group of 40 respondents (PBS). So when a FOX result of 32% with an error rate of ?5% (for example) is compared to a PBS answer of 16% with an error rate of ? 11%, statistically speaking the results are identical. Well, let's see: 45% of FOX viewers believed all three of the whoppers vs. 4% of the PBS/NPR crowd. Even if we assume an ample margin of error of ?7% for the FOX group, we would still need a margin of error of ?34% for the PBS/NPR crowd for there to be even a chance that they're the same. Not likely. The difference between the two groups is still statistically significant. Even if the PBS/NPR results are not completely reliable, there is still the fact that the FOX crowd performed worse than every single other group as well, including groups like CNN and NBC, whose sample sizes were roughly similar. There is more than enough statistical certitude to be able to say that FOX was clearly, irrefutably, the worst of the bunch. You are correct that 3% of 3334 is 100. But the analysis of the three key questions wasn't run on 3334 respondents, but on 1362. Three per cent of 1362 is 41 people. I have a hard time accepting that a sample of less than one PBS/NPR person per state is an accurate representation of all the PBS/NPR afficianados in America. You're right, my bad. That fact was nestled within the report and I overlooked it. I cannot argue that the results for PBS/NPR are ironclad, but once again, the sheer span of the difference between them and the FOX group on many questions is STILL enough, despite the small sample size, to be significant. If the differences were in the single digits, they wouldn't be. And I repeat, once again, that the FOX crowd performed worse than EVERYBODY else, and that everybody else is certainly a large enough sample to be significant. Actually, I read the Gallup site too (thanks again for giving us the link) and it turns out their selection of respondents was identical to that used in the US, except that rather than using randomized phone numbers within representative geographical areas, they used randomized addresses. This is exactly the same method they used up until the mid-eighties in the US as well. You are omitting one absolutely crucial difference: Gallup polls in the US are nationwide whereas this was limited to urban Baghdad. In fact, the pollsters made a special effort to avoid the semi-rural outskirts of Baghdad because they just wanted this to be an urban Baghdad poll. I don't question the results for Baghdad, whatever they were (I haven't seen the actual numbers, although I understand that the results, when examined closely, are rather more equivocal than the administration tries to make them out to be), I simply question whether they are true of the entire Iraqi population. If you recall, we're talking about "Iraqis" not just "Baghdadis." It would help to see the actual questions as well, but since Gallup insists on hiding them from everybody except those willing to cough up $100, we'll have to leave that in the air for now. Do you have the results of the Gallup poll, by the way? There must be a (free) link to them somewhere. Finally, you have YET to address the fact that there was a positive correlation between the amount of attention that people whose main news source was FOX paid to the news and the percentage by which they got those three questions wrong. In other words, the more attention they paid to FOX, the more in error they were. I'm really eager to see how you try to explain that one away.
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Fred's son Registered: 10/18/00 Posts: 12,949 Loc: Dominican Republ Last seen: 9 years, 17 days |
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EchoVortex writes:
As it happens, "impressions" are precisely, and unfortunately, what most voters rely on when deciding to support a policy or elect a candidate. For that reason, impressions are politically significant, and media play a huge role in shaping them. Yes, I am aware of that. For example, studies have shown for year that taller political candidates do better than shorter ones. Any sales manager will tell you that taller salespeople (on average) sell more than short ones, too. There was even a study I saw somewhere in the last month (sorry, didn't bookmark it) that showed your height has as much to do with your lifetime earnings potential (in America at least) as your level of education, and in some fields of work actually has a greater effect than education. For whatever reason, more people prefer dealing with tall people than with short ones. This is based on nothing more than perception. But that is not what we are debating here. I have said that the study is not designed well enough to draw a firm conclusion that watching network news makes you dumber. Now you are trying to switch it over to which political candidate the news watcher is more likely to vote for. Earlier you were insisting this has to do purely with errors in factual knowledge -- that it didn't matter which facts were involved. Which is it? Yes, it is quite likely that more people would have answered "don't know." But what you are overlooking is that all respondents were given the same instructions, so there is no reason to believe that the ratio of misperceptions (or false impressions, if you prefer) would have been any different. Yes, there is a reason. Those who felt more certain of their opinions would have chosen the "don't know" option less frequently. There are significant differences in the demographic makeup of the network news viewers vs print readers -- political affiliation, level of education, importance of religious beliefs -- and even among the various network news viewers. For example, CBS viewers had some odd anomalies compared to the rest. Do Republicans have more confidence in their opinions than Democrats do, or is the reverse the case? Do less-educated people have more confidence in their opinions than better-educated ones or is it the other way around? I'll admit that I don't know which is the case, since I have seen no relevant studies on the issue. So can we confidently claim that a more Republican, more religiously dogmatic, less-educated group (FOX viewers) will say "I don't know" in exactly the same ratio as a more Democrat, more secular, better-educated group (PBS/NPR)? No, we cannot. We can guess, but we have already agreed that speculation won't cut the mustard in this thread. Which still doesn't change the fact that people get those impressions from somewhere and that those impressions are politically significant. See my above comments re political significance vs questions of fact. This is just a side note, but it's rather disconcerting to see a self-designated libertarian constantly rushing to the defense of a massive government... Where on earth do you get that from? I am defending neither the media nor government. I merely point out your inconsistency in believing (probably correctly) that media commentators manipulate words in a biased manner yet the authors of the study did not. You still haven't pointed out any problems in the wording of the questions themselves, only the wording of the instructions. The instruction has the same import that the question does. For whatever reason, you are convinced that the percentages would have been identical whether the instructions read as they did or if they had cautioned the respondents to answer only the ones they were 100% sure of. I dispute that contention. I cannot see why you are being so stubborn on this point. Surely you don't believe you will get the same answer to the following two questions : "Is it your impression -- whether you are confident of your answer or not, whether you have any knowledge of his actual statement or not -- that Bush, in his State of the Union address, claimed Iraq was an imminent threat to the US?" and "Are you 100% certain that Bush, in his State of the Union address, claimed Iraq was an imminent threat to the US?" Most of the questions gave respondents a range of choices as to what they thought reality to be. And yet in PIPA's detailed analysis, that range of questions was ignored, with the authors instead deliberately choosing to focus on a single option: and not on the option which had the highest percentage response, but on the one they judged most egregiously wrong. For example, in the al-Qaeda/Saddam link question, here were the choices: Iraq was directly involved in carrying out the September 11th attacks There was no connection at all A few al-Qaeda individuals visited Iraq or had contact with Iraqi officials Iraq gave substantial support to al-Qaeda, but was not involved in the September 11th attacks Despite having four completely distinct choices, 22% of the respondents still went straight for the first option--that Iraq was directly involved in carrying out the attacks--despite the fact that this is the choice that is factually most indefensible. This is not a problem with the question, which gives a range of possibilities, but with the ignorance (or false impressions, if you prefer) of the respondents. And I still say the percentage would have been different given different instructions and the standard "I don't know" option. You choose to believe otherwise. There is no point in discussing this further, since there is no way of verifying whose position is correct. We can spin our wheels for months on this one. Well, let's see: 45% of FOX viewers believed all three of the whoppers vs. 4% of the PBS/NPR crowd. A group of 41 is too small to obtain reliable data from. The difference between the two groups is still statistically significant. A group of 41 is too small to even think of using the term "statistically significant". I wish Rhizoid would look at this thread. He knows a lot more about statistical analysis than I do. He could probably give us a much better idea of the margin of error. Even if the PBS/NPR results are not completely reliable, there is still the fact that the FOX crowd performed worse than every single other group as well, including groups like CNN and NBC, whose sample sizes were roughly similar. That is not correct either. Re-read the results of the CBS group. In at least two other questions (not the three questions on which PIPA focused) they did worse than the FOX group. As I said in my reply to infidelGOD, I suspect this determined which three questions PIPA focused on. Why not report on all five questions? Obviously they had the necessary data. Could it be that including the results of all five questions would have undermined the conclusion they were determined to draw? I cannot argue that the results for PBS/NPR are ironclad, but once again, the sheer span of the difference between them and the FOX group on many questions is STILL enough, despite the small sample size, to be significant. If the differences were in the single digits, they wouldn't be. So you say. I am not willing to say the same. Neither of us are statistical experts, so this is one that cannot be resolved without outside help. You are omitting one absolutely crucial difference: Gallup polls in the US are nationwide whereas this was limited to urban Baghdad. Yes, I know. Neither Gallup nor I are claiming that the poll deals with anything other than Baghdad. The previous poll of the other three areas (I believe it was a Zogby poll, but I can't remember for sure) around Basra, Mosul, and the other area whose name escapes me at the moment, had even higher approval rates than the Baghdad poll. Do you have the results of the Gallup poll, by the way? There must be a (free) link to them somewhere. Links to articles reporting on both the Baghdad poll and the Basra/Mosul/whatever poll have been posted in several threads here in this forum. Sorry, but I am on a borrowed laptop at the moment. My main computer is waiting for a new motherboard. Until then I have no access to my archived links. You'll have to do a search of the forum to find them. ' Finally, you have YET to address the fact that there was a positive correlation between the amount of attention that people whose main news source was FOX paid to the news and the percentage by which they got those three questions wrong. In other words, the more attention they paid to FOX, the more in error they were. I'm really eager to see how you try to explain that one away. People with preconceptions tend to look for support for these preconceptions and ignore the rest. In the case of FOX, this may be a rabid O'Reilly or Hannity or Limbaugh fan who never misses one of their shows, and uses their opinions and commentary as factual support for his point of view. These guys reinforce what he is already predisposed to believe. We have seen this same phenomenon demonstrated repeatedly in this forum. As just one example, not so long ago we had posts from someone who obviously spends a lot of time searching for info on points of political interest -- this person pays a lot of attention to news items on areas of interest to this person. This is demonstrated by the large number of links this person can provide at the drop of a hat. This person is an enthusiastic activist. Yet this person was flabbergasted to find that the Bush administration had never claimed there was a link between Saddam Hussein and the September 11 attacks, and that Bush had never said there was an imminent threat to the US from Iraq. I can guarantee you this person is not a FOX watcher. Here we have someone who has a great deal of interest in the goings-on in the world who was for months certain of two things which were in fact false. Now let's look at FOX viewers: From what I have read in this forum, many people here are convinced that many FOX watchers (as a group) are similar to the person I described above -- they are more than just casual news watchers, they love their FOX; they are fans of FOX -- they are enthusiasts; finally there is a news outlet that appears to think the same way they do. There seem to be more FOX viewers who fit this description than say ABC news viewers. Since I have never seen FOX or met a FOX News fan, I bow to the superior knowledge of the others posting here; I am willing to believe there is a qualitative difference in the personalities of FOX watchers vs watchers of other network news shows. And, there appears to be something in the makeup of many FOX watchers that makes them more prone to certain preconceptions -- just as Noam Chomsky fans are more prone to certain other preconceptions. The point is that this kind of enthusiast (or political junkie or however you want to describe them) naturally tends to pay closer attention to thing political than the guy who has the tv on as background noise while he eats his dinner, yet just because he pays more attention does not guarantee that his preconceptions will be altered. Let's be realistic: he doesn't pay attention in order to have his beliefs proven wrong, but to have them vindicated. I repeat my premise that given a different set of questions -- a set of questions which fall on both sides of a given political issue rather than the three lopsided questions cherry-picked by PIPA -- the FOX group would do better; not necessarily because they know more about it, but because the correct answer fits with their preconceived worldview. I realize you will not accept my premise lacking another poll, so there is really no point dwelling further on it. pinky
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