Taiwan Matters!

Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Bloomberg blows Ma Ying-jeou's ratings up like a balloon

Er, "inflates"

A September 8 Bloomberg piece by Tim Culpan and Janet Ong contains a huge "error" which serves Taiwan's current president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九):

Approval Rating

Ma’s approval dropped to a record low of 29 percent after the typhoon claimed so many lives, according to an Aug. 18 survey of 919 adults conducted by the United Daily News. The poll had a margin of error of 3.29 percentage points. About 46 percent of respondents didn’t have confidence in his administration’s relief and rebuilding efforts in the aftermath of the storm.

Bloomberg's number increases Ma's actual rating by almost 45 percent (13 percentage points). As I wrote on August 20 [highlighting added this time around]:

A survey released by pro-blue, 100% Chinese-funded TVBS says that Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou's (馬英九) approval rating is now at 16 percent [212 kb Hanzi PDF file] following his inept and deadly response to Typhoon Morakot which began battering Taiwan on August 7, 2009, leaving a village with approximately 500 people buried in a gargantuan mudslide, thousands stranded -- some for over a week -- and tens of thousands inundated by deep flooding.

When TVBS says their own guy is doing this bad, he's doing much worse.(Click to enlarge)

I sent an e-mail with the above information to both Culpan and Ong last night just to be sure that these Taiwan-based reporters hadn't somehow overlooked the huge news about Ma's 16 percent approval rating. Yet approximately 24 hours later, there hasn't been any sort of reply, so I think that it's safe to say at this point that they either published this "error" on purpose or simply don't care about the facts.

As of 9:50 PM September 9, a figure which was off by almost 45% (and which was already pointed out to the authors) remained in this Bloomberg article.
(Click to enlarge)
When it comes to Ma Ying-jeou, can you believe Bloomberg?