I saw this headline
Budget cuts favored for reducing deficit: poll
on the yahoo.com news aggregator and got the faint smell of rat, so I clicked it to see if the headline reflected the poll mentioned.
As I suspected, not so much.
The Rueters/Ipsos poll the story is based on asked how the budget deficit should be closed and found that:
22% picked budget cuts alone
36% picked more cuts than tax increases
17% picked more tax increases than cuts
7% picked tax increases alone
From this data, the resultant headline was the best summation?
The lede was even worse:
Cutting government programs is favored as the way to reduce the budget deficit by more than twice as many Americans as those who favor raising taxes, said a Reuters/Ipsos poll.
Sorry, that's just not close to true.
Check my math, but it seems to me that cutting spending to some degree was picked by 75% and raising taxes to some degree was picked by 60%. Adding the first two groups and comparing them with the last two gets you that 2 to 1 margin, but the rest of the lede does not accurately describe the two groups.
A more accurate and defensible lede would be
A mixture of tax increases and budget cuts is favored as the way to reduce the budget deficit by more than twice as many American as those who favor budget cuts alone.
It both fits the data better and more accurately describes the current political debate. Republicans don't just want an emphasis on cuts rather than on taxes, they want budget cuts alone, and have even advocated for more tax cuts.
Worse, the article mentions the so-called Buffet Rule, but fails to point out that a CNN/ORC poll released yesterday found that 72% support it. Comically, an equally unreported Reuters/Ipsos poll from March 14 found support for the rule at 64%. Guess that would have conflicted with the "reporting" in this article.
Thus, someone, either at Reuters or Yahoo.com is flat out lying to you with this story. My journalism proffs at the University of Texas would have flunked the headline and the story, and yet, this passes for news.
Click here to read the whole thing. It's pretty short, mercifully.