from Eugene Volokh: "JUST 38 PERCENT [OF AMERICANS] SAID THE CONFLICT WAS GOING WELL ON MONDAY," says the first paragraph of an Associated Press story, citing a Pew poll. Uh, no. As the story says about ten paragraphs down, that's the fraction who said the conflict was going very well.

More to this story from me:
It wasn't just AP that agenda-edited the poll results; Pew can't summarize their own poll results either.

Pew reported these percentages on a summary graph for the caption, "war is going very well:" Thu-50%, Fri-71%, Sat-71%, Sun-52%, Mon-38%.

I defy any math whiz to square those numbers with the following results in their published questionnaire result detail (bad formatting not my fault). For one thing, there's only 4 columns for 5 days' results!

PRC5 How well is the U.S. military effort in Iraq going? [READ]

Early Nov Oct 15-21 Oct 10-14
2001 2001 2001
57 Very well 30 38 45
31 Fairly well 45 45 35
4 Not too well 12 9 6
1 Not at all well 4 2 4
7 Don't know/Refused 9 6 10
100 100 100 100

Posted By Clyde at March 26, 2003 01:10 AM