X-Treme Dieting Not So Popular After All

Y’know those polls the were citing a while back saying that a huge percentage of the American populace approved of Terri being starved to death and even would like to be starved to death if they were in Terri Schiavo’s situation.

Well, as Mark Twain said, there are three kinds of lies: "Lies, damned lies, and statistics." The latter are so, so easy to skew by asking the wrong questions and spinning the public’s perception of what is going on (e.g., describing someone as "on life support" or "comatose" when you ask the question).

Well, guess what!

Zogby has come out with a poll showing that people aren’t so keen on starving themselves or others to death. And Zogby is a highly-Democrat-skewing pollster, making this one all the more significant.

Kudos to Zogby for producing a better-than-average poll on this issue!

EXCERPT:

"If a disabled person is not terminally ill, not in a coma, and not being
kept alive on life support, and they have no written directive, should or should
they not be denied food and water," the poll asked.

A whopping 79 percent said the patient should not have food and water taken
away while just 9 percent said yes.

GET THE STORY.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

4 thoughts on “X-Treme Dieting Not So Popular After All”

  1. Zogby has come out with a poll showing that people aren’t so keen on starving themselves or others to death. And Zogby is a highly-Democrat-skewing pollster, making this one all the more significant.
    Zogby may be trying to shed his relatively new “highly-Democrat-skewing pollster” reputation by doing a “conservative-friendly poll” when it’s already too late to affect the Schiavo affair.
    Kudos to Zogby for producing a better-than-average poll on this issue!
    Just because the poll is more to our liking doesn’t mean it is better. We should hold poll results that we like but come from skewed questions in just as much suspicion as those we don’t like that come from skewed questions. If the poll question had said “severely brain damaged” instead of merely “disabled,” I think the results would have been less encouraging. The culture of life is still a looong way away.
    And will the MSM give coverage to this Zogby poll comparable to the earlier claims that Americans approved of starving Terri? Don’t hold your breath!
    I’m sure they won’t, but not just because of bias: the crisis is over, so poll results like this are no longer a priority for the MSM. Nor do I think that that is unreasonable. Sure, they should run it as a counterbalance to the poll results from the last few weeks, but even if running this poll (which has problems of its own) were a kind of retraction, the media never makes retractions as major as the stories themselves. As far as I know, that’s the way it’s always been.

  2. Publius, you really took your sour pills today.
    Re: liking the poll. The basis for my liking the Zogby poll better is not that I like the results better. It is that my instincts tell me that the prior polls were *wrong.* I felt, at the time, that the only way they could produce the absurdly high “kill Terri” results that they did was if they used prejudicial language that did not accurately reflect Terri’s situation in order to skew the results and that if someone asked more explicit, better-defined questions that the results would be significantly different.
    Kudos to Zogby for having done so.

  3. Jimmy,
    I admit that I’m in a somewhat sour mood today, and I apologize for the tone of my message reflecting that.
    I don’t trust the earlier poll results, but I don’t trust the Zogby poll results either (at least as applied to Terri’s situation while she was still with us). The question left out details that would (unfortunately be relevant to a very significant portion of the population, such as the nature of the disability (i.e., I think there are many out there who were lamentably okay with starving Terri, but would not agree with starving a paraplegic whose brain was completely healthy). I think the truth lies somewhere in between the two results, though I fear (given the Zeitgeist) that it’s closer to the “kill Terri” number. The Zogby poll is useful in showing everyone who much the result of a poll can change with the wording of the question, though.

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