Blog Poll
Posted at 7:53 am on Tuesday, March 13, 2007, in Uncategorized, and tagged blogs.
A New York Times blog has blogged a poll on political blogs…
Image: New York Times
What I’d be more interested in is how often people read political blogs, or how much time they spend reading blogs, or to what degree people get their news (via links, etc.) or opinions from blogs, relative to mainstream news sites, e.g., the New York Times. Measuring whether or not a person has “ever visited a political blog” before, if that is how they posed the question (which I’m assuming they did), is misleading, because at this stage, it is pretty hard not to have ever visited a political blog. Even if you just get your news from the main sources (NY Times, WaPo, Time), they too have blogs. Did the poll-takers consider these columns as political blogs, or are they considering just outside-the-mainstream archetypal blogs, e.g., Huffington Post, Daily Kos, etc.?
Oh wait. “More than half of the adults surveyed, 58 percent, said they never visited political blogs. Of those who do, 24 percent said they visit them rarely and 14 percent occasionally. Only 4 percent said it was a frequent occurrence.” I don’t really trust this poll. Are they including mainstream blogs? (Seems not.)
The blogger certainly mistyped her second sentence because using the phrase “of those who do” would mean resetting to a full hundred percent for the subsequent comparison, which she obviously didn’t. For example, 50 percent of those polled prefer oranges over apples. Of those who prefer oranges, 50 percent say the main reason is the tartness of the peel. Using the NY Times’ blogger’s incorrect logic, that would mean 100 percent of those who choose oranges or 50 percent of the whole sample group, when the truth is clearly 25 percent of the polled sample group chose oranges because of its peel tartness. A big difference.
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March 15th, 2007 at 5:42 am
Like you, I’m a little suspicious of this poll’s results, since the questions seem to have been worded rather carlessly. What also raises some questions is that the 3% error rate is larger for the subgroups, but the table doesn’t say how much. While a 3% error rate is acceptable, a larger one would tend to invalidate the “results” found in the subgroups. Another poll which doesn’t reveal much, I think.