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Charlie Nelson's Blog
Snafu at the Australian Financial Review
Today's Financial Review reported on an Ipsos poll concerning the Victorian state election which will be held on 29 November. Apart from voting intention, the poll canvassed voters views on the most important issue and which of the two major parties were best to manage them.
The most important issue was health & hospitals, nominated by 24% of respondents. The tables had 53% saying Labor was the best party to handle the issue while 53% said the LNP coalition was. But that adds up to over 100%!
The second most important issue was education, nominated by 19% of respondents. Labor was reported as being seen as the best to handle it by 56% of respondents - as was the LNP.
The same sorry and obviously wrong figures went on for each of the eight issues.
It was not a problem in reporting by Ipsos, as the Financial Review's stable mate The Age managed to get the figures right.
I checked the Financial Review's website at 9am, expecting that by then someone would have noticed the errors and fixed them, but no the same errors were evident.
This is an easy error for a reader to detect and it should have been easy for an editor to detect.
I checked their website again at 9pm and the error had still not been corrected!
How many harder to detect errors slip through? Standards are clearly dropping at the Australian Financial Review.
Charlie Nelson
30 October 2012