Thursday, January 29, 2004

Adventures in headline writing

This is the headline on the results of a poll done for Newsweak (that's not a typo) as reported by MSNBC:

"Bush's Secret Weapon: Young Voters
"Though it's not clear who they'll vote for, most 18- to 29-year-olds say for now, they're behind both the president and the war in Iraq"

And here is the first paragraph of the story.
January 26 - Young voters are sharply divided on the economy, the Iraq war and overall approval of President George W. Bush's job performance, according to an exclusive new Newsweek poll conducted among young voters, the Newsweek Genext Poll. While the near-equal partisan divide among young voters mirrors the split between U.S. voters overall, the poll also suggests that on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, 18-29 year-olds are eager to move beyond the partisan battles of the past.
Just how in hell does that headline match that text?

That's especially true because the figures offered say young voters roughly mirror the rest of the populace on foreign and economic policies (and are evenly split on whether they would definitely vote for or against Bush) but are actually, overall, a little more liberal than their elders on same-sex marriages and overturning Roe v. Wade.

The "Bush inevitability" meme seems well-established already.

Footnote: An interesting sidelight of the poll, noted in the article, is that compared to Protestants and white fundamentalists, young Catholics are consistently more liberal on both same-sex marriages and abortion.

The times, they are a-changin'.

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