You may have heard about the recent Harris Poll that said almost half of Americans think Rush Limbaugh is the News and Current Events personality they dislike the most:<\/p>\n
Harris Poll Results<\/a><\/p>\n Now the details – Harris provided a list of 26 possible answers and asked the people to select the 3 persons they liked the most, and disliked the most, and asked the people if they were Republicans, Democrats or independents.<\/p>\n Problem #1 – Harris chose the list<\/p>\n You won’t find Glenn Beck as a choice, or Michael Savage, or Mark Levin, or Bill Bennett, or Ed Schultz, or Bill Press.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The only choices on the list are TV personalities – with the one exception of Rush Limbaugh.\u00a0\u00a0 Talk about apples and oranges (or how irrelevant radio is to America?)<\/p>\n Problem #2 – The poll is of people on the Internet<\/p>\n This was a poll of online users only, who answered using their web site<\/p>\n Problem #3 – The poll is weighted<\/p>\n Harris took the raw numbers and weighted them based on what they believe real America is – as opposed to the 2,000 people who answered – including weighting the results based on how much time the people spend online.\u00a0 Once you give up trying to pick a representative sample from a population and instead use a known skewed sample and weight the results to try to create an approximation of the entire population, the results can pretty much say anything someone has paid you to make the outcome to be.<\/p>\n Problem #4: – the poll is self selected<\/p>\n The people who answered the poll are those people who wanted to answer the poll.\u00a0\u00a0 As the disclaimer at the end admits, with participation in the poll being voluntary and self-selected, it is impossible to calculate a margin of error – meaning that it’s a totally useless, meaningless poll.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You may have heard about the recent Harris Poll that said almost half of Americans think Rush Limbaugh is the News and Current Events personality they dislike the most: Harris Poll Results Now the details – Harris provided a list … Continue reading