Media Polls

Media Polls

The headline reads “Poll: More Americans blame Bush for 9/11” The article goes on to say that the percentage of Americans who blame Bush has risen from almost a third of the public to almost half, and that 45 percent said they blamed him “a great deal” or a “moderate amount”.

How many thousands of individuals were polled? Read the fine print.1004 Americans were surveyed by telephone. They claim the margin of error is 3 percent. I just visited the US Census Bureau online and it says the population at the moment is 299,720,375. According to my publicly educated brain, that works out to .00000335 percent of the population that actually participated in this poll.

There is an old saying that says "There are three ways to not tell the truth: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

If you want to deceive people, get some statistics and make sure they support your view. If they don't, just keep working on them until they do. The truth is, you can use statistics to try to prove just about anything. But then this is nothing new for the media.

If you say something enough times, some people will start to believe it.