StinkyJournalism.org's 2011 Top Ten 'Dubious Polling' Awards

Art Science Research Laboratory's  StinkyJournalism.org announces the Third Annual Top Ten 'Dubious Polling' Awards,  presented by former Gallup pollster David Moore of the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire

NEW YORK, Jan. 26, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- These 2011 awards highlight the top ten most Dubious Polls of 2010 which could reasonably be called the Year of Polling Dangerously. Or, more to the point,  the Year of Polling Ridiculously.

By either name, the media ethics project, sponsored by the Art Science Research Laboratory in New York—and its resident expert on polling, David W. Moore—has released the Third Annual Top Ten "Dubious Polling" Awards.

The ten results are not pretty. But they are pretty funny. (Better to laugh than cry at the polling inaccuracies).

Take, for example, the 10th-place finisher, Pew Research's Social and Demographic Trends Project, which received the "Sour On Romance" Award.

Pew would have us think that marriage is so over in America because their polling found that the numbers of American adults saying "marriage is obsolete" has increased by 11 percentage points since 1978.

"Holy Cupid," says author, pollster and political scientist Moore, "I don't think so!"

In fact, Moore discovered, by studying the methodology of the poll and the data collected, that the increase—based on Pew's own data—was only 8 percent, and that that increase could be entirely due to questionnaire design.

Our 6th-place finisher, Rasmussen and its subsidiary, Pulse Opinion Research, got so many election result predictions wrong in 2010 that they earned the "Try Harder Next Time" Award.  

Indeed, Rasmussen's polling research subsidiary got one election prediction wrong by 40 percentage points, a virtually unheard of measure of failure.

Read the full report and learn more about the Top Ten "Dubious Polling" Awards and the 2011 recipients who have earned them.  Go to StinkyJournalism.org. Alexa ranks StinkyJournalism.org in the Top 20 most visited news media watchdogs.

StinkyJournalism.org   is published by Art Science Research Laboratory (ASRL), a not-for-profit, co-founded by its director, Rhonda Roland Shearer, an adjunct lecturer at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Iowa, and her late husband, Harvard professor and scientist, Stephen Jay Gould.  ASRL is a non-partisan journalism ethics program in which students and young journalists work with professional researchers to promote the media's use of scientific methods and experts before publication.

David W. Moore is a Senior Fellow with the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. He is a former Vice President of the Gallup Organization and was a senior editor with the Gallup Poll for thirteen years. He is author of  The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls (Beacon, 2008; trade paperback edition, 2009). Publishers' Weekly refers to it as a "succinct and damning critique...Keen and witty throughout."

SOURCE StinkyJournalism.org