StinkyJournalism.org Debuts the PollSkeptics Report, a New Column Penned by Veteran Pollsters

NEW YORK, April 5 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- StinkyJournalism.org announces the launch of a bimonthly, critical column about public opinion polls, entitled PollSkeptics Report.

Authored by two veterans of the polling profession, George Bishop of the University of Cincinnati and David Moore of the University of New Hampshire, the column will take a critical and skeptical look at ongoing poll releases in the news media.  The debut column, "We are Poll Skeptics, Not Poll Cynics" to be posted on Monday, April 5, 2010, broadly outlines the authors' critical stance toward many of the poll findings reported in the news.

Bishop and Moore are also the creators of the popular Annual Top Ten "Dubious Polling" Awards, posted on StinkyJournalism.org.  Alexa ranks StinkyJournalism.org in the Top 20 most visited news media watchdogs.

"We believe that polls done properly can provide useful insights about what the public thinks," says Bishop, a long-time scholar and practitioner of surveys. "But too often pollsters use faulty techniques that produce an illusion of public opinion. In this column we plan to demonstrate the difference between the fiction and reality of what the public may be thinking."

Moore, a former managing editor of the Gallup Poll, believes that polls are especially useful when asking people about their personal experiences. "But when it comes to measuring the public's policy preferences," he says, "the polls often provide misleading and contradictory results that undermine their credibility. The problem is with poorly designed and executed polls, not the public."

George F. Bishop is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Graduate Certificate Program in Public Opinion and Survey Research at the University of Cincinnati. He is author most recently of The Illusion of Public Opinion: Fact and Artifact in American Public Opinion Polls (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), which was included in Choice Magazine's list of outstanding academic titles for 2005.

David W. 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. Before that, he was Professor of Political Science at the University of New Hampshire. 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 (ASRL), a not-for-profit, co-founded by Rhonda Roland Shearer, 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

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