My first poll (Hypocrite)

Ian Wishart will save us all from ourselves this weekend with

“will be breaking a massive story, implicating two current cabinet ministers and a former Labour cabinet minister, in an unprecedented political scandal”.

What will this be, take part in my first online poll and prove me a hypocrite as I have posted time and time again about how I hate online polls. So have some fun for a change. I have made it so you can vote as often as you like.

I hate hate hate online and txt polls

Not because they don’t always say what I want to hear (that’s life toughen up), they are a very strange marketing tool.

Take tonight’s poll by TVNZ on the leaders debate. According to TV1 47,000 people took part. At a dollar a vote that’s nearly $50k that TVNZ took in revenue. But what did it tell us, sod all except nearly 50,000 people could be bothered cheering for their man or woman.

They are not representative, they aren’t scientific and thus they have no validity. God just have a look at any of the Stuff online polls to see how bloody stupid they are.

But nice little earner for TVNZ, would that have covered the cost of the broadcasts? Still nice money if you can get it.

Show me the data

You show me the empirical data that shows that the death penalty or imprisonment without the chance of parole makes the streets safer and/or prevents crime and I’ll consider it.

Otherwise it’s just vindictive justice based on retribution rather than public safety.

The media’s got a stiffie about itself…

I have never been a fan of those inane polls that they carry on news web sites, aside from all of the issues like the stupidity of the questions and even greater insanity of the answers they let you choose from. Today however, it took a strange twist.

From the story about National’s policy on ‘Life meaning Life’, Stuff ran a story about itself – or the comments that people left on it’s website, which in turn led to a front page poll, which created more copy for itself.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/vote08/4718242a28435.html

There are several issues here, apart from the gross nature of some of the comments;