The NYT has a story today headlined "For Public, Obama Didn’t Fill in Health Blanks." Reading that headline, you might think the story is about a scientific poll of the general public's reaction to President Obama's press conference.
No such luck.
Instead, the story is a misleading presentation of interview excerpts with four families, without any explanation as to how or why they were selected. From the comments of these four "families" (actually only five people are quoted in the article), along with a bunch of misstatements and phony "analysis," the Times reaches the remarkable conclusion that the "Public" (i.e., the over 300 million people who live in the U.S.) feel "Obama Didn't Fill in Health Blanks" -- that is, his press conference was a failure.
The story focuses on four "families," who are described thus:
Craig (36) and Judith (35), parents of four, who live in Snellville, Georgia. They are black (of Jamaican birth), and they both "supported John McCain in the presidential race."
Rowena Ventura (44), a white "registered Democrat and part-time health care worker" who lives in Cleveland. Her "ailing mother" is shown in a picture but not quoted or paraphrased in the article.
Dean Raschke (38), white. He is married with a two-year-old child, but though his wife is mentioned she is not quoted or paraphrased in the article. He is described as "[a]n affluent small-business owner from near Chicago," [Gilberts, Illinois] He is "a McCain voter."
Finally, "Liz Wessen, 32, a manager for a market research firm in Denver, supported Mr. Obama in November." She is also white.
So of the 5 people interviewed (supposedly representative of the American public), three are McCain voters, and only one supported Obama. (It's telling that although Ventura is described as a "registered Democrat" there is no mention of her vote in 2008, suggesting she likely stayed home, which would indicate she is as likely to be a conservative as a liberal -- also supported by her statements in the article.)
There is no mention of how these people were selected or found. Nor is there any description of the questions they were asked, or how the interviews were conducted. From the by-lines and credits in the article, it appears a Times reporter and photographer went to each of the four homes to watch the press conference with the "families." There must have been extensive conversation, from which only a few lines for each household are excerpted in the article.
The Times should not have run this article. The headline and the content both will only provide fodder for critics of Obama and health care reform. There is no evidence that the people interviewed are representative of the public at large. In fact, the available evidence all suggests that they are not representative. 60% of them voted for McCain, while 20% voted for Obama.
While it's admirable that the Times interviewed two black people, it is also remarkable that they managed to find two black McCain voters. Given that the national exit polls suggest that at least 95% of black voters last November pulled the lever for Obama, the odds of randomly coming across two black people who are both McCain supporters are roughly 400 to 1.
These kinds of articles are incredibly dangerous. They are obviously subject to overwhelming sampling error that makes any conclusions to be drawn from the interviews entirely unreliable. At best, the Times should have fully disclosed how it found the people and made public the full content of the interviews. But that would not have made for a good story or a catchy headline (which just happens to play right into the current meme of health care reform on the ropes).