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If youâre an avid news reader, thereâs a good chance that sometime in the last day or so youâve come across a headline trumpeting an apparent decline in public support for abortion rights. But depending on the source you were readingâand how close you were paying attentionâyou may not have gotten the full picture.
The source of the claim that opinion is shifting is a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, which does, indeed, find a substantial drop in people who say abortion should be legal in most or all cases. As with all poll results, though, there are a few questions to ask about this one, including: was the poll methodologically sound? And how does it compare to findings from other organizations? In other words, is this result part of a trend, or is it an outlier?
The first of those questions requires technical expertise that itâs not reasonable to expect most reporters (including this one) to possess, or most readers to sift through. The second, though, can be answered with a quick Web search, and itâs an important part of how any poll is presented. In this case, as people who follow poll results know, public opinion on abortion has historically been remarkably stable. That very stability is what makes an apparent shift newsworthy, but it raises the burden of proof considerably, and it is itself an essential part of the story.
So how has the media handled this story? It depends on which media youâre reading. A brief Reuters story available through a number of outlets begins with the declaration that âsupport for abortion rights has slipped in America this year,â and doesnât examine whether other polls have reached different conclusions. A blog post at USA Todayâs site takes the same approach: the Pew poll stands on its own, with no connection to other findings.
The same canât be said of this post at The Christian Science Monitorâs âThe Vote Blog.â After summarizing the findings, that post declares that âthe Pew data tracks with trends found by other pollsters.â That sounds, at first, like important context. But the post cites only one other pollster with similar dataâGallup, which in May found for the first time that more Americans identified as âpro-lifeâ than âpro-choice.â That survey appeared about the same time as earlier Pew survey which also found a conservative shiftâand both encountered skepticism, partly on methodological grounds and partly because they were at odds with the bulk of recent research. So citing that Gallup study as confirmation of this Pew result doesnât tell us much that we didnât already knowâespecially since a subsequent Gallup poll in August found the trend moving back in the other direction.
So did anyone do better? Yes, actually. The lede and headline of the New York Timesâs story donât differ much from Reutersâ, but the piece quickly starts throwing in the caveats, noting that âthe apparent shift⌠contradicts some other recent polls.â Later, the article notes that âpolls conducted by some other organizations within the last few months have found opinion on abortion to be more stable,â and adds that the inconsistency âmakes it hard to draw a firm conclusion about whether attitudes are shifting.â Another interesting nugget: Pew noted that the movement it found coincided with Democratic control of the White House; one counterintuitive reading is that abortion opinion may shift against the prevailing political winds. But, the Times notes, no such shift happened when Bill Clinton moved into the Oval Office.
With so many caveats needed, itâs reasonable to ask whether the Pew poll warrants a story at all. Indeed, a search of The Washington Post‘s Web site doesn’t turn up an article on the topic. The Postâs âBehind the Numbersâ blog, though, flagged the findings while injecting the appropriate caution: âother polls, including the Washington Post-ABC News poll, have not picked up such a basic reorientation on this divisive issue.â Thatâs not just boosterism for the in-house product: âNational polls by the AP, CBS News and the New York Times and Quinnipiac University also show no big increase in opposition to legal abortion,â Post blogger/pollster John Cohen continues.
Thatâs not to say the Pew results should be dismissedâas Cohen acknowledges, they may be catching early signs that âopinions thought settled for a decade are now in flux.â At the very least, it’s worth keeping a closer eye on the next round of data from other sources. But until we see more, what we have is suggestive, not conclusiveâand stories that donât make that distinction are letting their readers down.
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