PressEthic

The latest New York Times/CBS News poll has Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, the Democratic candidate for Governor, widening his lead on opponent John Faso. Media outlets around the state picked up the results indicating that if the election was held today 64 percent of the voters surveyed would vote for Mr. Spitzer and 18 percent would vote for Mr. Faso.

According to the New York Times,

Five weeks before the election about 8 in 10 voters said that they had no opinion of Mr. Spitzer’s Republican rival, John Faso. Mr. Spitzer, a Democrat, is supported by a majority of those surveyed not only in the Democratic-dominated city, but also in its more heavily Republican suburbs and in upstate areas.

The New York Times put the story on the front page (under the fold) and continued it on page B6 in the Metro section. The continuation page had a small section titled, “How the Poll Was Conducted,” outlining the general methodology of the poll.

The poll is based on telephone interviews conducted September 24 – 27 with 904 adults throughout the state. Of those 734 said they were registered to vote. Interviews were conducted in either English or Spanish.

The [telephone] exchanges were chosen to ensure that each region of the state was represented in proportion to its population. For each exchange, the telephone numbers were formed by random digits, thus permitting access to listed and unlisted numbers alike.

The results have been weighted to take account of household size and the number of telephone lines into the residence, and to adjust for variations in sample relating to region of the state, race, Hispanic origin, sex, marital status, age and education.

(The full outline on how the New York Times and CBS conducted the poll is available in the article online.)

I pulled the coverage that was posted on two TV stations in other areas of the state to find out if they included any information on the methodology in their segments.

Capital News 9 in Albany, NY used the Associated Press coverage but during their live segment they did not include any information on how it was conducted. (Video is available online of the segment.) Central News 9 (an NBC affiliate) did not have video available of any broadcast coverage, but they did pick up the AP story, which again did not include any information of the poll methodology or a description of the sample.

Surprisingly, the Web site of the Albany-based newspaper, the Times-Union, did not have coverage of the poll results at all.

Should all media outlets include a description of the methodology and sample of a poll? Or, it is up to the reader to assume responsibility for finding out how a newspaper or newscast obtained the information? In the case of this poll, it is reflecting how likely voters will vote and the Governor’s race is not exactly close. But, don’t the readers still have the right to know how a poll sample was selected and what the results really mean? Absolutely.

The New York Times Guidelines on Integrity includes sections on quotations, fact checking, and other people’s reporting. They also have an Ethical Journalism Guidebook on their Web site that does not include anything in the index about using polling data or explaining poll methodology. The Washington Post’s ethics guidelines also do not include instruction on how much information to include about polling data.