Tuesday, February 9, 2010

MURDOCH COMPANY NEWSPOLL CAUGHT FUDGING THE NUMBERS BY ROY MORGAN RESEARCH

Garry Morgan, executive chairman of Roy Morgan Research, one of Australasia’s most respected pollsters, has recently accused News Ltd’s Newspoll owned by Rupert Murdoch of deliberately allowing Newspoll figures to be published knowing them to be in error. In other words; Newspoll have been caught fudging the numbers to suit their political agenda.

According to Gary Morgan, in a poll conducted early in November last year Newspoll claimed that coalition support had jumped 7% while ALP support had dropped 7%. Such a large margin of change, coupled with another figure showing the Consumer Confidence Rating going up in contradiction to what one would normally expect given Newspoll’s numbers, should have rung alarm bells that in turn should have led to another poll being taken straight away said Gary Morgan. This did not happen and News Ltd went ahead and published the false figures.

Furthermore, not only were the ‘rogue’ figures published, but figures that showed strong support for Labor regarding their policies about ‘boat people’ refugees were not published.

Morgan said, “That pollsters and those that publish the polls have a responsibility to report the facts and the truth”. He went on to say that, “Polls and their publishers should not seek to set the agenda by selectively releasing polling data”, and that, “Polls and their publishers are powerful but with that power comes responsibility”.

One wonders how many others of Newspoll’s polls have been fudged.

Murdoch’s NewsLies strikes again.

9 comments:

  1. Murdoch. Australian democracy's worst enemy.

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  2. Merde Och! has won the election.

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  3. Not sure he actaully WON it; more STOLE it by using his massive propaganda machine to influence public opinion.

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    Replies
    1. If Oz gets sucked in again in Qld and Federally, well they deserve more pain

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  4. I saw a link to this article posted on Twitter recently. As the original link to the Morgan page is no longer up I thought it might be useful for historical purposes to post the Wayback link to the Morgan article: http://web.archive.org/web/20091121005041/http://www.roymorgan.com/news/polls/2009/4433/

    When the Wayback link is read carefully it turns out that Morgan did not accuse Newspoll of fudging anything. Rather a single Newspoll had a dodgy sample as a result of random error (not deliberate fudging) and was then taken far too seriously by media outlets.

    Morgan suggested Newspoll should have immediately taken another sample and released it if it was different but Morgan have released plenty of obviously rogue polls themselves from time to time and I don't recall them ever following their own advice.

    Newspoll actually did the right thing by releasing their data even though they would surely have known it was a suspect sample. Ideally pollsters when releasing a clearly suspect sample should accompany their poll with a disclaimer. But very few pollsters ever do this.

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  5. Kevin, I didn't say that Morgan had said that Newspoll had fudged the numbers; It was me that said that Newspoll had fudged the numbers. I said that based on the fact that Newspoll knew the numbers were wrong yet went ahead and published them anyway. It's as simple as that.

    Suspect poll data should never be published; just do the poll again and retain credibility - even if it does cost.

    I reiterate; the 'fudging' is in the fact that they published dodgy numbers knowing they were dodgy.

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  6. By the way, Kevin, thanks for the new live link. Very useful.

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