|
well, the branch of the pew trust that sponsored/produced this poll monitors attitudes toward religion(s) in the states, so they were just doing what they do. each of their polls comes accompanies with press releases and some expectation that they'll get picked up and repeated in the larger hall of mirrors that is the press. but that's a variable. independent one. so it turns out in this case that alot of what makes the poll interesting is its timing.
and if you actually look at the report (fugly links to it above, in no. 41), you see that the business about obama's putative muslimness are but one aspect of it. it's a kind of interesting snapshot of the contradictory attitudes of a sample of the population of the united states that the pew researchers happened to contact.
you can find an overview of the project on page 25 of the report.
26 to the end reproduces the results.
personally, i'm agnostic about the value of polls in general, and found this one vaguely interesting, but for the reasons i've already outlined.
at the same time, though, there's critique and there's critique: if you have a problem with the poll itself, it probably makes sense to read it and point to particular areas that you see as being a problem. i imagine there are such---i haven't been motivated enough in this case to go through the methodology section--but it's there, in the report.
and that kind of critique is fine. it can be interesting, even, when everyone has access to the same information (which we do)..
but the vague "o what good do these poll thingies do anyway?" particularly when looped through "they just make us all judgmental" without any reference to the poll itself is a little annoying. because it's not based on anything. it's not a whole lot different from conservative complaints about their favorite collective phantasm, the "liberal press" which is something they refer to routinely without ever locating because, really, it's a phantasm. you can't really debate with the folk who accept the existence of the phantasm "liberal press" because there's nothing common to point to and no agreement about interpretation, etc etc etc.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|