MSNBC blunders over poll position

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

This story got some surprising play....... the WSJ had something on it a
few days ago, and here is the Register take.
Jamie

http://www.theregister.co.uk/991111-000014.html


Posted 11/11/99 2:34pm by Graham Lea

MSNBC blunders over poll position

Polls conducted on the Internet are prone to being invaded by
afficionados who wish their view to prevail. There are, of course, other
ways to give an incorrect picture of sentiment, such as miscounting the
voting, or -- as has just happened -- having a bug that does not allow
certain categories of voters to express a view. 

As pointed out by Joeri Sebrechts ("How about that MSNBC?" in The
Register Bulletin Board), an MSNBC poll after Judge Jackson's findings
strangely did not allow Netscape Navigator users to vote.  Nobody
expects MSNBC to be particularly anti-Microsoft, but the service was
badly caught out when it asked whether readers agreed that Microsoft had
monopoly power and that consumers have been harmed, and what should
happen. As is so often the case, the form of the questions was
technically flawed, but that was not the major problem (only one remedy
could be suggested, for example). 

Netscape users found they could not vote because the voting buttons,
which appeared fleetingly, did not render properly. Debate centred
around whether this was deliberate, since denying voting to Netscape
users would most likely bias the result towards Microsoft, or whether it
was just incompetent. It was soon flushed out that the problem was with
Netscape's buggy way of dealing with cascading style sheets. The Opera
browser (which is as near standard as you can get in a browser) did
render the questionnaire correctly, as did Mozilla M10 but not KDF. This
begs the question as to whether MSNBC knew that Netscape had a problem
in this area, which was exploited, or again, was just technically
incompetent. It was noteworthy that the site proclaims that it is
"optimised for IE and Windows Media Player" and is maintained by MSNBC
Interactive News, One Microsoft Way, Fort Redmond. The problem was
reported to MSNBC, and suddenly the applet was fixed for Netscape with
Windows. 


  [snip]



-- 
James Love / Director, Consumer Project on Technology
http://www.cptech.org / love@cptech.org
P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036
voice 202.387.8030 / fax 202.234.5176