FOX Fort Wayne News just broadcast the only scientific poll of the GOP Precinct Committe Members in advance of their caucus on Saturday to select the 3rd District Congressional Candidate. It was a major undertaking but well worth the effort.

There’s a big difference between a scientific poll and the kind you see on most media outlets. A scientific poll takes a lot more work. First, it requires actively contacting a representative and randomly-selected sample of the likely voters. We had to get a list of all 500 plus Precinct Committee Members from all eight counties in the 3rd district. Elkhart County’s Republican Party refused to give us theirs. So we got that list from an anonymous source. The Republicans in the other counties were more helpful.

Next we apportioned our sample based on the number of Committee Members in each county. We knew we wanted a total of 125 members spread across the eight counties in order to get a reasonable margin of error.

FOX Fort Wayne News Reporter Daniel Woodruff did the lion’s share of the calling. He recruited other members of the staff to help.

The poll revealed that Marlin Stutzman led with a sizeable 37 percent. “Undecided” was next with 30 percent. Stutzman can only lose if a majority of those go with another candidate. But anything is possible.

Other media outlets have used online polling. There are several reasons that those polls mean nothing. First, anyone can vote — not just Committee Members. And only Committee Members will be making the decision on Saturday. Second, anyone can vote any number of times. That means participants can effectively “stuff the ballot box” in the online polls. And third, these online polls can’t even guess at a margin of error. So you can’t know how much you can rely on them.

If other media outlets were honest, they would confess all these facts when they present the results of their online “poll.” But they hope you won’t know the difference. It’s another reason why FOX Fort Wayne should be your choice for accurate information. We’ll let you know when a poll is scientific, and when it isn’t.

The FOX Fort Wayne poll of GOP Committee Members can be found at fortwaynehomepage.net

Here’s a brief article I wrote for our corporate newsletter concerning our election software. It might interest computer geeks (like me).

A little more than a year after its first newscast, WFFT, Fort Wayne put together its first election coverage for the Indiana May 4^th primary. We accomplished it without dedicated election software.

 News Director Jim Blue constructed an Excel spreadsheet that funneled data gathered from 13 counties; totaled multi-county Congressional, State Representative, and State Senate districts; and sorted the results to place leading candidates at the top. In all, we followed 40 races on election night.

Chief Engineer Fred Brunell wrote Visual Basic code that scanned the relevant cells in the spreadsheet and directed the data for use by the Codi. We transferred the numbers from our data entry computer to the networked drive using only a flash drive.

The first results were on the air before our established competition. We maintained totals in all the races until 100 percent of the vote was in for most of our coverage area.

 We felt the night demonstrated how some inventiveness and sweat can prevail over an off-the-shelf solution. And the price was right!

I’ve noticed some writing habits among reporters in Fort Wayne. To be fair, reporters in every market get into ruts. But sometimes it takes a person with a fresh ear to spot them.

One of our competitors frequently is “digging deeper” on stories. I thought I was the first one to use that phrase here. Once the competition adopted it as a kind of signature, I dropped it. I guess I should have copyrighted it.

Reporters everywhere will often conclude their stories with, “Police continue to investigate.” Well, I would hope so! That’s their job. Now, if they failed to investigate, that would be worth mentioning.

Injured individuals are often taken to a ”local hospital.” I certainly wouldn’t expect them to be taken to a “distant hospital.”

Three boys were arrested recently for the murder of the father of one of them. Some reporters always refer to them as “young boys.” I think a young boy is four years old or so. Does that mean these kids, ages 12 to 15, are “old boys?” Perhaps they should just be called “boys.”

Every word counts. We need to challenge the habits that bloat our writing.

FOX Fort Wayne got a central fact wrong in last night’s story about high infant mortality rates among Black babies in Allen County.

In their news release, HealthVisions of Fort Wayne inaccurately reported the Black Infant Mortality rate in Allen County as “over 30 percent.” That is incorrect. The correct figure is 31 per one thousand live births. Converted to a percentage it would be 3.1%
Infant mortality rates are normally reported as deaths per 1,000 live births.

The central thrust of the story is still correct. Black babies are dying in Allen County at an alarming rate. Even the corrected figure still is far higher than almost all other Indiana counties. Only St. Joseph County’s rate is comparable.

Anytime something inaccurate is reported on FOX Fort Wayne, whether we made a mistake or someone else did, we will correct it in our next newscast. We will make that correction tonight, Wednesday, April 7th, at 10PM