On bogus stories and spotting them

Today's quiz: What's the difference between these two stories?

If your answer was on the order of "One is about a well-attested empirical phenomenon of the grownup world, and the other is about a fictional crisis fabricated by a tiny cabal of self-interested, America-hating kleptocrats and their media enablers," take the rest of the day off. Otherwise, stick around.

Let's go ahead and bust some bubbles to start with:

• It's the sled
• Rick makes Ilse get on the plane with Victor
• There is no Santa Claus

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Hat trick of survey fail

Of the things you can get wrong with reporting on public opinion, Ohio's Greatest Home Newspaper manages to hit almost all of them in this 1A tale (with charts). In no particular order, they represent failings of writing, statistical presentation and reporting. Let's go:

It might be legal, but that doesn't make it right.

That's generally how we feel about the mosque and Islamic community center proposed for near where New York's twin towers fell nine years ago today, says a new poll of the Columbus area conducted by Saperstein Associates for The Dispatch.

Never report survey results as a reflection of what "we" feel. They are not. That's the cheapest of cheap USA Today-style populism. Surveys show what proportions of a population say at a particular time. It's no more accurate to say "we feel" something than to say "we support" the candidate who took 55% of the vote in an election. And while you're at it, never write ledes of the form "Dead. That's what the man was when they found him," even in Thurber's old hometown.

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