Fox News fiddles with climate change polling

[meegbear]

Do you want to know how serious the "Climategate" hacked e-mail scandal is? It's so serious that, according to Rasmussen, 120 percent of Americans have an opinion on it. At least, that's what I learned from watching the December 4 edition of Fox & Friends, which featured this graphic:



What happened? Well, here's the Rasmussen poll Fox & Friends cited. They asked respondents: "In order to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming, how likely is it that some scientists have falsified research data?" According to the poll, 35 percent thought it very likely, 24 percent somewhat likely, 21 percent not very likely, and 5 percent not likely at all (15 percent weren't sure).

Fox News' graphics department added together the "very likely" and "somewhat likely" numbers to reach 59 percent, and called that new group "somewhat likely." Then, for some reason, they threw in the 35 percent "very likely" as their own group, even though they already added that number to the "somewhat likely" percentage. Then they mashed together the "not very likely" and "not likely at all" groups, and threw the 15 percent who were unsure into the waste bin. Voila -- 120 percent.

As such, Fox News' presentation of the data made it seem as though 94 percent of Americans think it's at least "somewhat likely" that climate scientists falsify their research data.

<snip>

http://mediamatters.org/blog/200912080002

[bluetrain]

1. The Devil invented maths!

[HopeHoops]

2. I still don't understand how anyone can call Fox a "news" channel.

What morons.

[NC_Nurse]

3. Doesn't anyone there know how to ADD? Geez.

[jdlh8894]

4. Guess not

But somebody knows how to photoshop :evilfrown:

[donco6]

5. I think they're just giving their followers what they want.

They look at news as a commodity. Give the people what they want. They know their audience wants to believe global climate change is not man-made, so they feed that to them. The numbers don't matter one bit.