StinkyJournalism's New PollSkeptics Report: 'Pew's Credibility Gap: A Strange Tale of What Passes for Transparency Among America's Polling Leaders'

NEW YORK, July 29 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- When the Pew Research Center, one of the world's most respected sources for public opinion polls and analysis, is discovered engaging in some shaky polling methodology, the situation warrants more than a private email admitting error. And it certainly warrants more than an undisclosed correction on their web site that they did not know was accurate for 34 days.  

This, however, is exactly what David W. Moore, a former Gallup pollster and StinkyJournalism columnist, found during his two-month effort to get the Pew Research Center to come clean about a recent poll conducted by their in-house Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The results of Moore's dogged research and tenacious pursuit of the truth from a bastion of truth-telling like Pew can be found in his sobering and eye-opening investigation posted in a PollSkeptics Report column. See Stinkyjournalism.org: "Pew's Credibility Gap: A Strange Tale of What Passes for Transparency Among America's Polling Leaders."

The strange tale begins in April, when Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism released a poll and report titled "News Leaders and the Future: News Executives, Skeptical of Government Subsidies, See Opportunity in Technology but Are Unsure About Revenue and the Future."

Veteran pollster David Moore, a Senior Fellow of the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire and a skeptic by nature, found a troubling contradiction when comparing a Pew Center's report to the poll's method statement.  It took two months of correspondence with Pew to get real answers about this discrepancy.  The methodology statement was eventually changed, but the footnote "update" only vaguely describes what really happened behind the scenes.    

Rather than immediately publish, Moore sought answers from Pew by asking for more information and some clarification. What ensued was a two-month runaround during which Pew finally changed the method statement to suit the report—but for 34 days they had no idea if the revision was correct, that is until Moore kept pushing them for consistent answers. Pew appeared to change its story several times. Ultimately—and largely because of Moore's tenacious queries—they issued a brief (but, alas, incomplete) revision and email statement available in his new StinkyJournalism.org report, found here.

Moore's story, which began as an investigation into a deceptive poll of news executive opinion, soon turned into a larger mystery about why Pew would stonewall a fellow pollster and journalist.

Ultimately, it's a tale about how a self-described "non-partisan 'fact-tank'," would not live up to its own commitment to transparency.

David W. Moore co-authors the PollSkeptics Report, a StinkyJournalism column, with fellow pollster, George F. Bishop, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Graduate Certificate Program in Public Opinion and Survey Research at the University of Cincinnati.  

Moore is Senior Fellow of the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. He is a former Vice President of the Gallup Organization and Managing Editor of the Gallup Poll. He is author most recently of The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls (Beacon Press, 2008; revised paperback edition, 2009), referred to by Publishers' Weekly as a "succinct and damning critique...Keen and witty throughout."

StinkyJournalism.org is published by Art Science Research Laboratory (ARSL), 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.

SOURCE StinkyJournalism.org