News Roundup for 12/8/09

FOX's factchecker

-Headline of the day-
"FOX fudges poll numbers to claim 120 percent of the public believes scientists falsify global warming data."

Talk about your overwhelming majorities. In reporting a Rasmussen poll, FOX News bitchslapped the numbers around until the poll showed that everybody -- plus 20% more -- think it's possible that scientists just might be making up this whole "global warming" thing. In that report, they put up this graphic:



You see the problem here, right? If 59% think it's "somewhat likely" that scientists are a bunch of liars, 35% think it's "very likely," and 26% think it's "not very likely," that all adds up to 120% of respondents at least accepting the possibility.

"Fox News' graphics department added together the 'very likely' and somewhat likely' numbers to reach 59 percent, and called that new group 'somewhat likely,'" explains Media Matters. "Then, for some reason, they threw in the 35 percent 'very likely' as their own group, even though they already added that number to the 'somewhat likely' percentage. Then they mashed together the 'not very likely' and 'not likely at all' groups, and threw the 15 percent who were unsure into the waste bin. Voila -- 120 percent."

You know what's funniest about all this? Math is a science. Scientists may not be fudging data to support their agenda, but FOX News sure is. (Think Progress)


-An awesome opening paragraph-
In a piece titled, "How rogue will Sarah Palin go?" Gabriel Winant opens with the following bit of great:


There are, let's agree, a lot of things that keep our attention on Sarah Palin. One of them is the way she's constantly refusing to participate in the relatively innocuous rituals of being a big-league politician. If someone asks a conservative politician what she reads regularly, for example, the appropriate response isn't to go blank and then spend a year being defensive about it. Just say "the Wall Street Journal" and be done with it. But Palin never has done things the easy way.


It goes on to wonder if Sarah's thinking about a third-party teabagger thingy sometime in the future, but who cares? She's all rogue and mavericky and stuff.

Teabags forever! w00t! (Salon)


-Short roundup-
I'm about five minutes away from getting about 30 or 40 feet of snow and I've got something on tap for a little later. So you get a short, two item roundup today.

Sucks to be you. (My Life)