Or they just are fairly dumb. Philip Bump of WaPo helpfully points out the errors of Fox & Friends of Fox News when evaluating some poll data from Survey Monkey:
Over the course of 2017, SurveyMonkey conducted 605,172 interviews of Americans. A quirk of statistical analysis is that the precision of poll results from a survey of 605,000 people vs. only 1,000 people is small; the former has essentially no margin of error, but the latter has a margin of error of only three points. This is why most pollsters don’t bother polling hundreds of thousands of people. Why spend the money when your estimate is good with far fewer people?
Those 605,172 interviews, though, were conducted over the course of the year …
On Tuesday morning’s “Fox and Friends,” the hosts were discussing a survey showing that most 2017 coverage of Trump’s presidency was negative. Kilmeade interjected with some good news.
“Believe it or not,” he said, “through all this negative coverage, they did a survey of 600,000 people about how black America views this president. His numbers have actually doubled in approval. It’s still low, it’s around 25 percent, but it’s doubled since the election.”
Okay. So. First of all, they didn’t do a survey of 600,000 black Americans. Second of all, Kilmeade clearly thinks that saying “600,000” adds heft to the results, which, as we noted above, it doesn’t. Third, Trump’s approval numbers haven’t doubled, for the reasons above — and then some.
Approval numbers necessarily start only when a president takes office; after all, how are you going to evaluate the job performance of someone who doesn’t yet hold a job? Gallup has asked Americans their views of Trump’s job as president since his first week in office, allowing us to compare approval ratings among black Americans from the earliest point to the most recently available ratings (through the end of 2017).
Trump’s approval among black Americans fell nine points from January to December. Rather than doubling, his approval rating among those Americans was actually more than cut in half, dropping from 15 percent to 6 percent.
Philip continues onward, disassembling Kilmeade as well as Neil Munro of Breitbart. And, you know, this isn’t opinion, or he says she says. This is statistics, cold hard math. Anyone can do it. But it appears Fox News and Breitbart think their readers are too lazy or ignorant to actually check up on the reasoning skills of these news outlets.
Which is right in line with their history.
