I am so going to miss Daniel Okrent. 13 Things I Meant to Write About but Never Did

I was thinking about one of his points the other day (before he made it of course). Now that I see it in print, I feel a lot better.

9. It's a story, say, about the New York City public schools. In the first paragraph a parent, apparently picked at random, testifies that they haven't improved. Readers are clearly expected to draw conclusions from this.

But it isn't clear why the individual was picked; it isn't possible to determine whether she's representative; and there's no way of knowing whether she knows what she's talking about. Calling on the individual man or woman on the street to make conclusive judgments is beneath journalistic dignity. If polls involving hundreds of people carry a cautionary note indicating a margin of error of plus-or-minus five points, what kind of consumer warning should be glued to a reporter's ad hoc poll of three or four respondents?

That's exactly how I felt about reading the following report. (Just expand the notion of a few parents commenting about local schools to a few people quoted on behalf of 20% of the all people on the Earth.)

Guantánamo Comes to Define U.S. to Muslims