Last week I blogged about the ABC/Washington Post poll on the sequester, citing with approval Matthew Yglesias’ characterization of the article reporting the results as “deeply misleading.”
Patrick J. Moynihan, a former senior polling analyst at ABC News, tweeted that my analysis was “unfair,” arguing that “Outright dismissal of research w/o considering more than the headline or b/c few q’s were asked is simplistic.”
Moynihan is wrong to say that I had not considered more than the headline or the limited number of questions in my critique. But even if I hadn’t (and I had), my response was that you can’t write a good analysis if the data are bad from the beginning. [cont.]
David W. Moore, iMediaEthics