Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Misleading news headlines about Trudeau

It's interesting how news reports can give a skewed impression of a news item, even ones that are not overtly partisan in their outlook.
Take a recent headline on the Bloomberg website, for example. It blares out, "Fewer Canadians See Trudeau as the Best Bet on Trump, Polls Show". Setting aside the awkward grammar and Yoda-esque sentence construction, the article continues, "A diminishing plurality of Canadians see Justin Trudeau as the best fit for for dealing with US President Donald Trump".
Continue reading, though, and what the Nanos poll actually shows is that 36% see Trudeau as the best bet for dealing with Trump, slightly down from 39% the last time the same poll question was asked. This is twice as many as think that second-position Andrew Scheer would be the best person for the job, and he too saw his numbers fall, from 21% to 18%. The only increase recorded was that of "No Federal Leader", which is a bit of a cop-out anyway. The NDP's Jagmeet Singh languished down at 2%.
So, you might expect the headline to have read something like, "Poll Shows Canadians Have Twice as Much Condidence in Trudeau to Deal with Donald Trump as Other Federal Leaders". But that's clearly not what Bloomberg decided to go with (and that from a news outlet with a supposedly slight left-of-centre bias and a high factual reporting rating).

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