Journalistic laziness

I was woken up this morning by the radio blaring that a poll on the world's largest Maori website had found that Maori were overwhelmingly in favour of outlawing gangs and throwing children in jail. The story is ultimately sourced from a press release from the Sensible Sentencing Trust, and has since shown up on TV3 as well, but you'd think that our journalists would at stop and think a little before checking the broadcast - or at least look at the polls in question. Unfortunately, they didn't. So, here's the bits they should have noticed.

Firstly, as I keep having to remind people, online polls are not statistically reliable. The sample is self-selecting, rather than randomly selected, and thus is unlikely to represent a true cross section of the community's views. They should therefore be treated with a grain of salt, rather than as serious news.

Secondly, looking at the poll results in question, we find that a grand total of 68 people expressed an opinion on whether gangs should be outlawed, and 43 on whether children accused of serious crimes should be tried and punished as adults. Both polls were held open for a month on what the Sensible Sentencing Trust calls "the largest Maori membership website", so its hardly a ringing endorsement.

Thirdly, even if by some miracle the self-selecting samples were random, rather than consisting mostly of angry rednecks wanting to vent their spleen, the margin of error on the two polls would be 12% and 15% respectively. Nobody, not even a social scientist (who are actually quite strict about such things) would consider that to be a credible or useful result.

In short, this story is a perfect example of lazy journalism, of reporters copy-pasting a press-release without bothering to check the facts for themselves. Meanwhile, if the "hang 'em high" brigade are down to relying on a handful of people in a self-selecting poll on an obscure website for support, they really are clutching at straws.