{"id":13822,"date":"2018-01-17T11:50:54","date_gmt":"2018-01-17T17:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=13822"},"modified":"2018-01-17T11:50:54","modified_gmt":"2018-01-17T17:50:54","slug":"truth-is-a-used-facial-tissue-for-these-duds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2018\/01\/17\/truth-is-a-used-facial-tissue-for-these-duds\/","title":{"rendered":"Truth Is A Used Facial Tissue For These Duds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Or they just are fairly dumb. Philip Bump of WaPo<\/strong><\/em> helpfully points out<\/a> the errors of Fox & Friends<\/strong><\/em> of Fox News<\/strong><\/em> when evaluating some poll data from Survey Monkey<\/strong><\/em>:<\/p>\n

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<\/a> margin of error, but the latter has a margin of error of only\u00a0three points. This is why most pollsters don\u2019t bother polling hundreds of thousands of people. Why spend the money when your estimate is good with far fewer people?<\/p>\n

Those 605,172 interviews, though, were conducted over the course of the year …<\/p>\n

On Tuesday morning\u2019s \u201cFox and Friends,\u201d the hosts were discussing a survey showing that most 2017 coverage of Trump\u2019s presidency was negative. Kilmeade interjected with some good news.<\/p>\n

\u201cBelieve it or not,\u201d he said, \u201cthrough 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\u2019s still low, it\u2019s around 25 percent, but it\u2019s doubled since the election.\u201d<\/p>\n

Okay. So. First of all, they didn\u2019t do a survey of 600,000 black Americans. Second of all, Kilmeade clearly thinks that saying \u201c600,000\u201d adds heft to the results, which, as we noted above, it doesn\u2019t. Third, Trump\u2019s approval numbers haven\u2019t doubled, for the reasons above \u2014 and then some.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t yet hold a job? Gallup has asked Americans their views of Trump\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s approval among black Americans fell\u00a0nine\u00a0points from January to December. Rather than doubling, his approval rating among those Americans was actually more than cut in half<\/em>, dropping from 15 percent to 6 percent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Philip continues onward, disassembling Kilmeade as well as Neil Munro of Breitbart<\/strong><\/em>. And, you know, this isn’t opinion, or he says she says<\/em>. This is statistics<\/em>, cold hard math. Anyone can do it. But it appears Fox News <\/strong><\/em>and Breitbart<\/strong><\/em> think their readers are too lazy or ignorant to actually check up on the reasoning skills of these news outlets.<\/p>\n

Which is right in line<\/a> with their history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13822"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13823,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13822\/revisions\/13823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}