Today’s eye on the media segment comes from a somewhat out of the way source. The July 3^rd edition of the Cape Coral Daily Breeze featured an article by Mckenzie Cassidy entitled “Poll: Affordable Healthcare needed” which in it’s self is nothing all that interesting, I am sure just about every poll in the nation says that. What struck me the most is the byline “Public option gets support”, and where exactly the Cape Coral Daily Breeze is getting their poll from. Turns out the poll they cite is was done by the Flordia chapter of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Which admititdly is like trusting Acorn to fairly count votes in an election.

I have written previously about polls that were complete trash methodology wise. However, the Cape Coral Daily Breeze seems to omit the good stuff about the poll such as methodology, so it is pretty hard to at first glance to figure out, just how accurate this poll really is, and if it is worth putting any weight behind.

The only data about the poll that they provide is:

Of all the people surveyed, 57 percent are members of a union, 64 percent are employed, 20 percent retired and 78 percent are insured.

However further research calls the validity of this poll into question, as according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2008 union memembers made up only 6.4 percent of the total Flordia workforce, which is quiet a bit less than the percentage of union members polled in the AFL-CIO survey.

Determining if this is simply a case of a lack of research by a reporter on a deadline or an attempt to hide the inconvient facts that do not support a political agenda, is pretty much impossible. All though it seems to be another case of “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.”

Tags: AFL CIO, Flordia, public-option, unions

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 10:50 pm and is filed under Eye on the Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.