Haaretz was called onto the carpet by its own pollster.
It seems the paper's loose translation of a Hebrew word gave editors the wiggle room to claim that Israelis overwhelmingly like President Obama. But Professor Camil Fuchs, Haaretz's pollster, slammed the paper's presentation of his work as "misleading."
He told the Jerusalem Post:
Both the English and Hebrew editions of Friday’s Haaretz led with the headline “Poll: Most Israelis see Obama as fair, friendly toward Israel.”
The English edition elaborated near a picture of Obama that “69% say Obama is fair and friendly.”
The story itself gives no numbers, but the lead says “A sweeping majority of Israelis think his treatment of this country is friendly and fair.”
The English edition contains no graphic distributing the actual numbers, either online or in print.
The print and online versions of the newspaper’s Hebrew edition included a graphic indicating that just 18 percent of respondents considered Obama “friendly” toward Israel, 3 percentage points fewer than the 21% who called the president “hostile” to the Jewish state.
Ten percent did not know, and 51% defined Obama’s approach to Israel using the Hebrew word “inyani,” which can be translated as “matter-of-fact” or “businesslike,” but not as fair.
Fuchs, who chairs Tel Aviv University’s statistics department, said he received many reactions from people around the world who were surprised by the poll’s headline. He distanced himself from the headline and criticized the way his poll was presented.
“What can I do? Only the editor writes the headlines,” Fuchs said.
“When they write the number 69 together, it is correct but misleading. They could just as easily have combined the hostile and inyani categories and gotten a different large number.”
I'll leave it to readers to comment on why Haaretz decided to lump a whopping 51 percent of the respondents with "friendly." My first reaction was to think of Mark Twain. He popularized the saying:
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
