Credit for this article goes entirely to RantingProfs; I just didn't like the format so I rewrote it completely.

The New York Times is incredibly deceptive.

Look at this article, "Many Iraqis Losing Hope that Politics Will Yield Real Change", containing, as the third paragraph:

Nothing like a scientific poll is possible yet in Iraq. But as the national assembly's first brief meeting came and went, broadcast into thousands of Iraqi homes on television, a sampling of street opinion in two Iraqi cities found a widespread dismay and even anger that the elections have not yet translated into a new government.

The first sentence is blatantly false! Scientific polls have been conducted for the past year or more, and we've been hearing them cited. (I remember them being cited in the run-up to the November US election -- as well as the one in Iraq in January. Does the NY Times think I would have forgotten all that already?)

For example, here is a recent one (available on the same day, in fact), in USA Today:

More Iraqis believe their country is headed in the right direction and fewer think it's going wrong than at any time since the U.S. invasion two years ago, according to a new poll....

The survey of 1,967 Iraqis was conducted Feb. 27-March 5, after Iraq held its first free elections in half a century in January. According to the poll, 62% say the country is headed in the right direction and 23% say it is headed in the wrong direction. That is the widest spread recorded in seven polls by the group...

Although a bit more positive, this result is not essentially different than so many recent ones. And note that things are getting better (at the moment) opinion-wise, not worse. Yet amazingly somehow the Times concludes the opposite? They've sent unnamed news-gatherers, to get a set of opinions (from whom?), and selected certain ones (how?) for us to see. Strangely, the opinions are almost universally pessimistic, which seems at odds with every single poll result I'm aware of.

In the first page and a half of the article, not even one single optimist. All apparently drawn from the 23% minority who think things are getting worse. Do you know what the odds are of that happening randomly? About 1 in 4000. We're almost to the end before we hear "Some Iraqis were less harsh," and we get one optimist, followed by more gloom and doom. Good heavens, even the only Kurd opinion they reported was negative! -- drawn from a group which was 14% more optimistic than average.

So, did the Times simply forget that polling has been happening for over a year now? Or could it be that, knowing full well how the polls have been turning out lately, the dishonest lead-in sentence about poll-impossibility simply provides a pretext for giving their audience a lopsided set of opinions, chosen in a completely unscientific (and apparently biased) manner, when actual scientific polls were apparently available?

This isn't news. This is spin. Worse, it's false.

What is this, some kind of political thing?

I can't believe so many people think this paper is somehow credible.