Poll-ish joke.
Daniel Radosh" Thirty years ago, after a decade of escalating war in Vietnam, slogans like 'America, Love It or Leave It' carried an angry punch. This time, the mantra of many New Yorkers seems to be, 'Everyone is entitled to his own opinion.'" So says The New York Times, employing the classic journalese, "seems to be," which in English means, "we're making this up."
Was the gap between pro- and anti-war camps greater during Vietnam? Consider the one piece of actual evidence in this anecdote-happy article: "One 1970 Harris poll found that 37 percent of Americans thought that protests against the Vietnam War should be illegal. Today, 61 percent say Americans who oppose the war should be allowed to hold protest marches and rallies, while 29 percent think that such activity is detrimental to the war effort, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll."
My first thought was that in presenting responses to what seems to be the same question asked 33 years apart, the writer has simply flipped which of the two possible answers she reports in order to make this passage read as if it supports the thesis of her argument, when in fact it refutes it. That is, the passage could just have easily read: "One 1970 Harris poll found that 63 percent of Americans thought that protests against the Vietnam War should be legal. Today, 61 percent say Americans who oppose the war should be allowed to hold protest marches and rallies..."
I blurted this out to Gina, who looked over the article and convinced me that the evidence does not actually refute the writer's thesis -- but it is totally meaningless and can't be used one way or the other. For starters, we're not told what the other choice(s) are in that 1970 poll. I assumed that the opposite of "protests should be illegal" is "protests should not be illegal." But I could be wrong -- after all, the 2003 question isn't neatly symmetrical. This year, people were asked, "Do you think Americans who oppose the war should be able to hold protest marches and rallies or does that hurt the war effort?" (question 34). To most people that "or" probably implies that if you don't answer "should be able to," you're saying, "should not be able to." But it's certainly possible to believe that protest "hurts the war effort" without thinking people should not be allowed to do it. And if you read the actual poll results (not included in the print edition) you'll see that 6 percent of respondents answered "both" -- even though that was not offered as a choice. (And since I'm obsessing here, the poll pop-up gives the responses as 62 and 28, not 61 and 29).
So we have three strikes: 1) Not enough info about the 1970 question. 2) No way to tell if the 2003 question is a true parallel to the 1970 one. 3) The 2003 question implies something it does not actually ask, rendering it useless. How difficult would it have been for The Times/CBS to ask: "Do you think Americans who oppose the war should be able to hold protest marches and rallies or should they not be able to because it hurts the war effort?" Or, if they wanted to ask the question their own way, why not offer "both" as one of the possible answers -- I'm sure they would have gotten a lot more takers for that if they had. True, they would have had to write a much more wishy-washy article, but when has that ever bothered The Times?