The award goes to the CBS News crew for their little gem entitled “Poll: Most Tea Party Supporters Say Their Taxes Are Fair”.  I seriously cannot believe that this is what passes for reporting.  My five year old could do better than this.

They start off fairly innocuously:

As Tea Partiers gather for today’s rally in Boston, home of the original Tea Party protest in 1773, 42 percent of Tea Party supporters think the amount of income taxes they’ll pay this year is unfair, according to a new CBS News/ New York Times poll.

Ok.  Sounds good so far.  You’d expect that, at the very least, almost half of the people protesting Big Government would be against the higher taxes they see as only feeding the beast.  No big shocker here.

Then comes their “GOTCHA!!!” sentence cluster (It’s not really a paragraph) that generated a more-than-slightly-painful faceplam when I read it…

Yet while some say the Tea Party stands for “Taxed Enough Already,” most Tea Party supporters – 52 percent – say their taxes are fair, the poll shows.

This was obviously supposed to generate the thought “Why are they so angry if they think their taxes are fair?”  I know this, because it generated that thought amongst liberals that I know and talk with regularly.

Let’s put this one to rest right quick and move on to bigger, better things.

Every one put on your logic caps for a moment.

If their taxes are fair right now, and any increases would make them unfair, then why do you think that the acronym Taxed Enough Already is misapplied to the TEA Party?

They’re stating that they are already taxed enough, they don’t need any new taxes.

This poll holds with that claim.

It’s not really a “GOTCHA” at all, now is it?

 

But upon further reflection, that’s not what I found most interesting about this poll.

1) They make the unsourced claim in the article:

Just under one in five Americans say they support the Tea Party movement.

We’re just supposed to accept that as gospel truth because it is coming from CBS, I guess.

2) They use that unsourced claim, that ~ 1 in 5 Americans support the TEA Party, as reason to modify the results of their survey.

Examine:

This poll was conducted among a random sample of 1,580 adults nationwide, interviewed by telephone April 5-12, 2010. Phone numbers were dialed from RDD samples of both standard land-lines and cell phones. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus three percentage points. The error for subgroups is higher.

An oversample of people who describe themselves as supporters of the Tea Party movement were interviewed, for a total of 881 interviews. The results were then weighted in proportion to the adult population. The margin of error for the sample of Tea Party supporters is three points. This poll release conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Polls.

(Bold text mine.  —  MM)

Now, this is interesting.

 What we have is a randomly generated survey group of 1,580 American citizens.  This is a good statistical pool, appropriately large enough to generate a nice, tight confidence interval, and greater scientific and statistical validity.  This is indicated by the fact that the error for the sample population as a whole is +/- 3%, normal for any of the major polls, and worthy of consideration from a scientific standpoint.

In their scientifically valid, random survey of over 1,500 people, 881 of them reported being TEA Party supporters.

Their polls shows 55% of the people being TEA Party supporters, NOT 20%.

Their poll is just as scientifically valid as any poll by Gallup , CNN , Rasmussen, any of them!  (Follow the links, and look at the methodology of each example.) 

That “55% support the TEA Party” is a valid result in a good scientific experiment!  Every single  one of us who has ever caught an episode of Mythbusters knows this!

But they forget Adam Savage’s other quip: Failure is always an option.

Their perfectly valid scientific survey returned results they didn’t like.  It said “TEA Party support is drawn from over half the nation’s population.”

So what did they do?  They just up and claimed “Well, you know, just one in five Americans support the TEA Party.”, with no sources to back this up, and a survey they themselves have done which indicates that this is not true.  Then they weighted the results of the poll, reducing the opinions of 55% of their respondents to roughly 1/4 of the weight of the press release results, and giving the opinions of 45% of their respondents 3/4 of the total weight.

That’s absolutely freaking ridiculous.  This whole thing is a complete lie.  An obvious, complete, only-the-dumbest-of-the-sheep-would-believe-this, lie. 

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