We established that Reuters reporters don’t understand English, so the Reuters name and their association with general incompetence is probably the only reason I noticed this.
A nifty article they write claims that Bush is the least popular among the last 10 Presidents but I don’t really care about their politics. What I care about are the numbers. They write:
“Only nine percent of the 662 people polled picked Bush as their favorite among the last 10 presidents. John F. Kennedy topped that part of the survey, with 26 percent, closely followed by Bill Clinton (25 percent) and Ronald Reagan (23 percent).”
Now wait a minute. I do numbers in my head all of the time so this makes no sense. If Bush got 9%, Kennedy got 26% Clinton 25% and Reagan 23%, that’s already 83% of the vote. From only four Presidents. So if there are 6 other Presidents in the poll, even if 5 of them got only 1%, that means only one other President could be ahead of him. If my math is correct, and it is, Bush was probably only 5 among the last 10 Presidents and it was only possible he could be sixth. So how did Reuters get last place out of that?
