Daily Telegraph fails to report its own poll accurately

Daily Telegraph fails to report its own poll accurately – again

By Mark Pack | Fri 21st September 2007 - 9:44 pm

Crikey, there must be a curse on reports of YouGov polls.

After this week’s Guardian blunder (saying that a YouGov poll showed the Liberal Democrat rating falling when, err…, it hadn’t) the Guardian at least had the excuse that it wasn’t its own poll that it was reporting. Credit though for correcting it the following day.

So full marks in the irony department to the Daily Telegraph for managing to muck up another YouGov poll report – though this time it is their own poll they’ve got wrong!

They have a new YouGov poll out tomorrow. It shows the Liberal Democrats up by two points compared with the previous Telegraph / YouGov poll (or one point compared with the previous YouGov poll in any publication).

So how have they reported it? “The Liberal Democrats have remained at the same level.”

Um, yes well. And it’s not as if it’s the first time they’ve made this sort of mistake in wrongly reporting their own figures to the detriment of the Liberal Democrats.

UPDATE: And as if by magic (well, after the Lib Dem media operation got on the case with impressive speed – beating my own blog posting to spotting the story by a good few minutes) … the Telegraph’s report has been updated commendably swiftly by the newspaper.

Read more by Mark Pack .
This entry was posted in Polls.

2 Comments

Chris Rennard 21st Sep '07 - 10:18pm

The Telegraph’s mistake was actually spotted by us at 9.16 and as a result corrected by them at 9.36 – full marks to our media team !

YouGov is always out of line with other polls giving us less support than anybody else and generally the Tories more.

This YouGov survey gives us 16% compared to latest polls from Populus (18%) and ICM (20%). But it is up 2% compared with the Telegraph’s August YouGov survey.

So all recent three polling organisations put us UP 2% or 3% in defiance of much media commentary.

The latest YouGov shows the Tories are unchanged on 33% (their GE figure under Howard) and Labour are down 2% compared to August at 39%.

So the change on the month according to YouGov is a 2% swing from Labour to Lib Dem. The Tories are not doing any better as a result of all their Commissions.

Given that YouGov gave the Tories 40% under Iain Duncan Smith, this will be particularly depressing reading for those about to head to Blackpool.
Stuart 22nd Sep '07 - 1:02am

I am feeling really positive after an excellent conference week, a superb speech by Ming championing liberal values, and now the rising poll scores.