Отрывок из книги
For my wife, Denise
II. Therapeutic Misadventures, the Economically Nonaffluent, and Deep-Chilled Chickens: The Doublespeak of Everyday Living
.....
Polls have become important commodities to be sold. Television news programs and newspapers use polls to show that they have the inside information, thus boosting their ratings and their circulation. Also, the more dramatic or unexpected the results of a poll, the better the chances the poll will be featured prominently on the evening news program. In addition to all this hype and use of polls as news, politicians, corporations, special- interest groups, and others have vested interests in the results of particular polls. Such people and groups have been known to design and conduct polls that will produce the results they want. In other words, polls can be and are a source of a lot of doublespeak.
How do you read a poll? Actually, it’s not all that hard, but the problem is that most poll results don’t give you enough information to tell whether the poll is worth anything. In order to evaluate the results of a poll, you need to know the wording of the question or questions asked by the poll taker, when the poll was taken, how many people responded, how the poll was conducted, who was polled, how many people were polled, and how they were selected. That’s a lot of information, and rarely does a poll ever give you more than just the results.
.....
