I'm always intrigued by the page the Washington Post calls "Free for All," which runs in the paper on Saturdays. Here's where readers get a chance to react to stories they've seen/read in the paper. Too often, those who write in use their one crack at fame to wax indignant over some minor offense, but occasionally, someone makes a serious and valid point, such as correcting a factual matter, or pointing out a different angle.
One example of the "good" that letter-writers can do were two different reactions to a piece the Post published entitled "6 in 10 Americans lack faith in Obama." That's a rather dramatic statement, and it turns out, one that's simply not borne out by the data the poll produced. As both letter-writers pointed out, in order to get to the "6 out of 10" result, the pollsters basically had to count people who said they had "some" confidence as if they had "no" confidence.
This may reflect the way the poll responses have been grouped in the past (this poll is run with the same/similar questions every couple of months) but it still isn't correct to say, as the writers Dan Balz and Jon Cohen did, that sixty percent of those polled "lack faith" - especially not on the front page of the post.
About the only thing we can give the Post credit for here is providing a link in the article to the actual raw data of the survey. At least it was possible, for those who bothered, to determine that the story line was a glaring misstatement.
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