BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

One from Column A, one from Column B

5 comments on One from Column A, one from Column B

One from Column A, one from Column B

: GoldDerby.com says it has an exclusive before tonight’s People’s Choice awards.They say both Fahrenheit 9/11 and Passion of the Christ will win awards — but it’s no long a scientific sampling of the people’s real choice; it’s an easily rigged internet poll now:

But are these selections REALLY the American people’s choices? CBS ditched Gallup Poll judging for cheap Internet voting that can be manipulated easily by zealous fans. “Tinseltown has been buzzing about organized campaigns on behalf of Moore’s Bush-bashing Fahrenheit 9/11, reports The New York Post.

Although “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Passion of the Christ” were shut out of next Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards, their Oscar campaigns for Best Picture will get a last-minute boost from victories tonight at the People’s Choice Awards (8 p.m., CBS).

“Fahrenheit” will triumph as Favorite Movie of 2004, while “Passion’s” hopes will be resurrected with a victory as Favorite Movie Drama — 2 of the People’s Choices 5 Best Picture races….

But controversy will certainly erupt after the victories of both films tonight when critics ask: Do the People’s Choice Awards REALLY reflect the views of the American public? Arguably, they did so in the past when winners were determined by a Gallup Poll survey, but voting was switched this year to less expensive — and less scientific — Internet balloting that’s easily manipulated by the zealous political and religious supporters.

5 responses to “One from Column A, one from Column B”

  1. Old Grouch Avatar
    Old Grouch

    Internet polls “less scientific”? That’s putting it mildly. How about “Internet polls are a joke”? Quoth the Slashdot poll disclaimer:

    “This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you’re using these numbers to do anything important, you’re insane.“

    Enough said.
    .

  2. Timothy Avatar
    Timothy

    The obvious answer is that the People’s Choice awards no longer reflect a random sample, and are therefore not statistically good indicators of nation-wide opinion. If internet polling could be modified such that each individual could only vote once, then maybe it’d be useful. As it stands, however, a self-selected sample where individuals can vote multiple times tells you nothing about the population the sample came from. Sure, you can assume that the internet poll sample came from a normallly distributed population samle (due to the size of the population) but there’s no way to draw unbiased conclusions about the mean and the variance of the population set from such a self-selected sample.

  3. Timothy Avatar
    Timothy

    Also, there’s no reason to assume that the sample is normally distributed, again because it is self-selected. A large enough sample will trend that way, but such selection problems will bias the sample heavily and make the distribution and its properties untenable for actual use.

  4. bk Avatar
    bk

    True. All true. Very true. And yet, one wonders whether these choices are appreciably crappier. Are they more worthy of being ignored than in the past? Maybe, but not by much.

  5. None Avatar
    None

    I now feel even better about myself for ignoring them than I did last year.