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Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics - The Manipulation of Public Opinion in America (Paperback)
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Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics - The Manipulation of Public Opinion in America (Paperback)
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"Vote early and often" is an old American joke. The funny thing is,
we now do that year in and year out in the form of endless public
opinion polls that have reached the point of being confused with
elections and with public opinion itself. Michael Wheeler's is the
first book to take on the polls and the pollsters and deal
forthrightly with the questions the people must ask. For example,
can polls be rigged? Do they affect voters? Do they affect policy
decisions? According to the author, the answer to each of these
questions is yes. To back all of his considerable digging, he makes
use of direct interviews with leading pollsters like George Gallup
and Louis Harris, and a host of politicians, ranging from Senators
Kennedy and Humphrey to former Nixon aides Colson and Ehrlichman.
In one revealing chapter he follows a typical interviewer around
for a day and gives the reader a real feeling for the ragged edges
of opinion sampling. Even the pollsters admit that their record is
marred by serious errors. The author shows that it is very much
worse than they will admit. Lies, Dam Lies, and Statistics is not
only about political polls, even though that is its most important
subject. There is a section on commercial polls, which may be even
less reliable than the others, and one on polls and television, in
which the emperor's clothes of the Nielsen ratings are described.
There is also a chapter on policing the polls, which the public
ought to find imperative in view of the rest of the book. An expose
with an alternative, this is a book whose time has come.
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