I think the topic of student’s religious preferences was a good idea for an article. However, the front page article on Thursday, Feb. 8, was not a good example of precision journalism. First of all, the pie chart seperates Christians from Catholics. Catholics are Christians. This error is repeated in other parts of the extended article.
Second, to declare a sample to be random means that all members of the population – that would be all 18,000 or so Cal Poly students had an equal chance of being selected.
Third, I think this article suffers an editorial bent. For instance, it states that the Daily was “stunned” to find that 72 percent aren’t involved in religious clubs on campus. The data should speak for itself without editorial comment. There are other instances as well. I hope the editors of the Mustang Daily look at this article and the planned subsequent ones again and rethink the presentation to be in alignment with outstanding journalistic standards.
Steven McDermott
Communication studies professor