Thursday, July 16, 2009

The Inquirer: Up means down?

Yesterday the SWS posted their quarterly survey results on the president's satisfaction ratings. In 2Q 2009 she had a net satisfaction of -31, which rates as a "bad" in their scale, but it is a slight rise from the -32 registered in the previous quarter. So it's truly puzzling why, the following day, the Philippine Daily Inquirer ran a front page story with the following title:


Dropping? Sure, a one point rise in net satisfaction is statistically negligible, but by no measure is it considered to be dropping. If you were to compare it on a year-on-year basis, it's still an improvement from the -38 in 2Q 2008. So what's up with that title?

Turns out the first six paragraphs of the actual article were dedicated solely to reporting the results from Luzon, where satisfaction did drop. What about the improved satisfaction ratings in the Visayas and Mindanao? Mentioned briefly at the end of paragraph seven-- and off of the front page.

Hey Inquirer, how about tomorrow you run a story titled "Philippine shares still dropping". I mean, the stock market did actually rise 1.5%, but there were still a couple of stocks in there that lost value, so the title is still okay by your logic, eh?

How do you get away with such irresponsible and routine deception? Where's the outrage?

1 comment:

  1. Inquirer thinks that's what their readers want to read. Or maybe the readers are dumb enough to lap up whatever information Inquirer wants to feed them.

    Thing is, it's not just Inquirer that's doing this.

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