Nate Silver Interviews Right Wing Documentary Maker About Push Poll
by KevinNovember 19th, 2008
This is delicious. A right wing documentary maker got Zogby to conduct a push poll designed, apparently, to make Obama voters look like idiots. Nate Silver explains why the questions are so ridiculous, misleading and inaccurate here and interviews the person who commissioned the poll here:
NS: Do you stand by all the statements in the survey as being unambiguously true?
JZ: I stand one hundred percent by the notion that there is absolutely zero ambiguity as to what the right answer is to any of the questions. With the one exception of the Palin-Russia-Alaska question which we asked the way we did for a very specific purpose which was to try and gauge the Tina Fey Effect which I think we did in a very effective manner which was what was actually said by Tina Fey, everyone attributed to Sarah Plain. But for purposes of scoring Obama supporters’ answers we counted Palin as a correct response.NS: What was the right answer to that [Palin] question?
JZ: The technically accurate question [sic] is that none of the four people said that, but we counted it as correct if they said Sarah Palin.NS: Why would you commission a survey question with no correct response?
JZ: The purpose of the question, you pinhead, was we wanted to determine the Tina Fey Effect.
It sorta goes downhill, in a gloriously hilarious fashion, from there. The last three or four questions are not to be missed.
That’s good stuff.
TG: several months ago there was a “Costas Now” special on HBO that had about four or five segments about sports media issues. One of them was about the old guard newspapermen vs. the new bloggers. Will Leitch, the founder of Deadspin (arguably the most successful sports blog out there) squares off (to Will’s shock) with Buzz Bissinger, long time sportswriter and author of the Tony LaRussa book, “Three Nights in Augst.” And then, in the words of movie plot outlines, hilarity ensues. It’s basically this interview, but only about baseball and the internet. If you ever come across it, watch it!
Not trying to thread-jack, please continue.