Monkey Cage: Reporting on polls is improving, but could still be better

The following is a guest post from NYU political scientist Nathaniel Beck.*****On Jan. 31, the New York Times (in print and on-line) had a fascinating Page One story about opinions of Americans on global warming, primarily as a function of party identification. The continuation page of the article had a long (12 paragraph — p. 12 used 12 column inches for this material; the online description is here) discussion of the methodology of the poll, and on first reading I was ecstatic to see such details. I do not know when newspaper polls starting telling people that sampling error is hardly the only source of uncertainty, but I was pleased to see it. In particular, the last two paragraphs read:Read full article >>