The New York Times' Conformity to AAPOR Standards of Disclosure for the Reporting of Public Opinion Polls

Abstract

This study examines the New York Times' conformity to the guidelines adopted by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) regarding minimal information that should be disclosed about a poll in any report of the poll results. The study reveals that stories based on polls conducted by the Times, regardless of length, are more likely to comply with the disclosure standards than stories on polls from other sources. A composite compliance score created to represent the sum of what was considered the positive score for each standard shows that about half of the articles in the study met five or fewer of the twelve standards studied, and about half met more than five.