A poll came out a few weeks ago showing that a good percentage of Democrats believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. A few percentage pts. below Republicans. Let's not continue the generalization that Democrat = enlightened & Republican = naive fool. We all know that there are sizable groups of easily led dingbats on both sides.
I agree with you completely. I like reading the Economist, becuase they don't distort things. I hate Fox, becuase they sometimes don't give you the whole story if it doesn't fit their agenda. That's not news, that's propaganda.
This is the second most-used forum on BigSoccer. I don't have time to go through every single post on every thread. The other thread fell off the front page out of disuse. Now that Dave has requested they be merged, I'm off to do so. You can climb down from your "The Moderator's a liberal!" cross now. You can claim to distrust polls all you want, but that would be sticking your head in the sand and ignoring facts. Polls are very reliable indicators of the way a total population feels about an issue. The truth is, the populace of almost every country in the world was overwelmingly against this war, including the populaces of such "coalition" members as England, Spain, and Italy. But of course they did. Why do just assume they didn't? http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/Media_10_02_03_Report.pdf Congratulations. All your guesses are wrong. See how cool I am when I actually look things up instead of guessing? Perceived Al Qaeda/Hussein relationship: 57% WMDs have been found: 22% Majority of people in world favored the war: 25% Here's the exact wording of the last question: "Thinking about how all the people in the world feel about the US having gone to war with Iraq, do you think: The majority of people favor the US having gone to war?" If this question tricked conservatives into giving the wrong answer, then they must be stupider than I thought.
Ding, ding, ding, Bingo!! There are plenty of conservative news organizations that do a good job of reporting the news. WSJ, The Economist, MacNeil/Lehrer News hour (Public broadcasting, but fairly conservative)... The reason that people who follow FOX news don't get things right isn't because FOX is conservative, that's an insult to conservatives. I think it's just hard for FOX viewers to filter out the truth in the midst of the latest high speed chase, followed by a couple of conservative and liberal blowhards, neither of whom are right, followed by an expose on botox.
Thanks for providing the link to the actual study. That is much more useful than the summaries in the original links. I don't have any problems with a liberal moderator and, I do not expect the moderator to follow every thread, but I was suprised that you started a new thread because you had actually posted in the old one. I wanted to clear up that my guessing wasn't that bad. I'm still going throught the report but I'm not sure why you selected : Perceived Al Qaeda/Hussein relationship: 57% WMDs have been found: 22% Majority of people in world favored the war: 25% considering all of the different percentages reported. In my post I was responding to what had been posted that being: * Saddam Hussein has been directly linked with the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. * Weapons of mass destruction have already been found in Iraq. * World opinion favored the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. On 9/11: The 57% breaks down as 22% who thought Iraq was directly involved in 9/11 , and 35% who thought that Iraq had given support to Al-queida. on world opinion I would assume you consider people who thought the views of people in other countries was balanced would be an "error" because they did not believe the opinion "favored" so you have to add that 31% to the 25% you mention to get 56%. so the breakdowns would be * Saddam Hussein has been directly linked with the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. 22% * Weapons of mass destruction have already been found in Iraq. 22% * World opinion favored the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. 56% Which means my guessing wasn't that bad.
Of course, BenReilly is right about this whole thing. While I'm no fan of Fox News in general, I read something about this recently that makes a valid point - the "untruths" themselves were slanted to generate these results. It brought up a few positions where the results might indeed go the other way. Such as: * President Bush claimed Iraq was an "imminent" threat. * President Bush claimed Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger in the SOTU. I don't remember all of them, but those two right there would deliver a decidedly different result, even on this very board.
The difference between your two questions and the three listed at the top of this thread is, of course, that your questions rely on semantics (i.e. did Bush ever use the word "imminent?" I don't know. Did he strongly state that we had to act quickly before we were attacked? Yes) while the other questions rely on provable, unambiguous data (For example, when Bush said "We've found the weapons of mass destruction.")
I see your point. Yet it still doesn't keep the media from repeating both of those lies I mentioned, even today.
Again I think you're using semantics. Did Bush ever use the word imminent? Not that I can find. Did he ever use terminology that could be implied as imminent? Certainly. FWIW, I've never seen the word imminent in quotes in a media source that I can remember, so if we're going to use semantics, the media never said that Bush used the word "imminent." Re: the Niger claim. It was pretty clever of his staff writers to pin that one on the British intelligence so he could cry foul when people claimed he said it. Of course, if he didn't believe it, he probably shouldn't have included it in his State of the Union address (yes, I know he said African and not Niger in the State of the Union address, but since nobody has offered any alternative venue, I think it's a fair assumption that Niger was what was intended in the speech).
I've seen it as recently as this month in an AP dispatch. I don't think it's been in quotes, but when it's repeated as often as it is, then it is problematic. I think the Bush team emphasized again and again that we had waited over a decade, and Saddam's time was running out. I'm not clear how that translated into "imminent". I'll agree that there was plenty of spin and sell by the Bush administration in making the case for war (which I think the administration should have to answer for), but let's not get carried away. There were a couple of other African countries mentioned. Perhaps the Congo and one other, but I'll be honest and say that I really don't remember at the moment, and I'm too lazy to dig it up.
Kinda like saying Al Gore found Love Canal and invented the internet? I agree when it comes to the imminent claim, Blair's government has a lot more to answer for than does Bush's. Fair enough I respect that approach
I will have to admit that reading this complete study there is a lot of interesting tidbits. I still think the whole thing is a little to political to use it as an indicator of media performance. I will have to admit that I very seldom watch fox news so I probably should not have implied that fox was a target just because it is conservative. And I would agree that people who listen to NPR while liberal, would also tend to be more educated and would not be likely to answer factual type question incorrect. An interesting part of the report to me was this part: "Higher exposure to news compounds the effect of political positions on the frequency of misperceptions. Taking the average level of the three key misperceptions—evidence that al-Qaeda links have been found, WMD have been found, world public opinion approves of the war—those who say they will vote for Bush and have higher levels of exposure to news are more likely to misperceive. Among Bush supporters who say they follow the news “not at all,” on average, 40% misperceive. This rises to an average of 54% misperceiving among those who follow the news very closely. The opposite dynamic occurs for those who say that they will vote for a Democratic nominee. Among Democratic supporters who do not pay attention at all, an average of 22% misperceive. At higher levels of attention, misperceptions drop, so that among those who follow the news very closely only an average of 11% misperceive." It is suprising to me that the Bush supporters who "misperceive" increased with people who follow the news closely. It seems like those are probably more hard core supporters, and they tried to read things into the questions that they wanted to. Like I said, I could easily have found myself answering the third question wrong. It would have been interesting to have conducted a survey like this with questions that Democrats would have had a strong political prefernce to answer incorrectly in the wake of the Lewinski affair when there was a natural tendency to want to support their president.
I found that surprising too, at first. But when I thought about it more, it made aLOT of sense. What would distinguish someone who followed the news "closely" from someone who doesn't? I would think the latter would watch maybe a half hour or so of TV news on most days. But people who would say they follow the news closely would go beyond that. What could that mean? I submit there are 3 things. 1. Reading a daily newspaper. 2. Spending alot of time watching one of the 24 hour news channels. 3. Reading websites. Of those 3, only the first would really improve one's score on this, *IF* (big if) you presume that a Bush supporter would watch FoxNews and not CNN, and would read right leaning websites instead of neutral or left leaning websites. Given that we KNOW they scored worse, we need an explanation for what is initially counterintuitive. So I think my explanation is a good one. Conversely, looking at the liberals, we once again learn that the SCLM ain't liberal. If it were, liberals would get as much or more truth from being casual consumers of news, as they do from being news junkies.
You may be right, but the problem with this study in general, is that it is of such a limited scope, you really need to be careful what conclusions you can draw from it.
go to google or yahoo or lycos, etc. and do a search for bias and polls and you will very quickly find out that you can poll almost any subject and get every possible result. First you use a limited number of respondents, then you have to choose where you do it and the biggest part is what questions and how you ask them and how you interprete the answers. You change the variables and you change the results. It's actually quite easy.
In "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot," Al Franken cites a similar study regarding those who listen to talk radio, with the added tidbit that while they scored the WORST, the thought they knew the MOST. So this study didn't exactly come out of left field.
How much do you really know about statistical modeling? Everything you state is technically true, but a well-designed study will a) take all of this into account, and b) take steps to eliminate these effects, so that the sample accurately models the population. You can't simply discount a study or poll's results simply because you don't like the results - you must examine the study design and find a flaw in order to disregard the results. Trust me on this; I do scientific studies every day of my working life.
I call Bullsh!t. Where is this study that talk radio listeners score worse than non-talk radio listeners. Everything I hear is the opposite. Of course, the studies I've heard of might've been factoring out the NPR-listening losers who drag down the score.
Are you judge and jury now? He hasn't even been indicted yet. Let's wait for that to happen before making Rush to judgment, pun intended.
Rush is a hypocritcal bastard. I hope he remains addicted the rest of his miserable life, and that his hearing loss is the least of his medical problems caused by his abuse of "hillbilly herion."
Your right but the point I am making is that you can't just take any poll and say "look at the results it must right." All these people are taking this info as if God had spoken. I think anyone with intelligence has to question something like this, since it is so biased, just as I would say the same thing if it was the other way around.
How is it biased? Show me. Hint: it's not biased because it has a result that you don't like. Find an error in the methodology, and we'll talk.