Broadwater's Poll: The True Believers Will Believe, The Rest of Us Can Scoff

The Broadwater folks released the results of a public opinion poll yesterday and Newsday found it sufficiently newsworthy but before you read about it, read the post I wrote, here, based on an email from someone on Long Island who was among those polled. Go ahead, read (again, it’s here), then come back.

Now that you’ve read it, you can read this Newsday story and decide whether to believe the poll.

To his credit, Newsday’s Tom Incantalupo went to the trouble of finding a believeable skeptic. Here’s what he wrote:

'… Philip Meyer, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Institute for Research in Social Science, said after reviewing the poll material Broadwater released that it was improperly done because it did not present both sides of the issue. "It shows that two in three New Yorkers support Broadwater as an energy solution after they listened to a one-sided explanation of it," he said.

'The poll results are at variance with another, conducted recently by Cablevision Inc.'s News12 and Hofstra University. That survey found only 37 percent of Long Islanders favoring Broadwater, 41 percent opposed and 22 percent undecided.'

(You’ll also note the similarity between the “Queen of England” quote in Newsday’s story and the “Queen of England” quote in my earlier post. My source that day was the same woman; I identified and then, after she asked me to take her name out, I removed it.)

With a decision by New York expected tomorrow or Thursday or Friday, the anti-Broadwater folks are going crazy with press releases and letters and media events. You can find summaries and links to just about everything new today here, at Chris Zurcher's headlines blog.