The Herald gets harpooned...

Cameron Slater has harpooned Granny Herald; he blogs:

The NZ Herald devoted half a page to their bullshit survey of 70 people.
Conveniently they also included online a link to their Tumblr Blog of the participants.
I went through them all.
Of the 70 people one was also a Herald columnist, Justin Newcombe.
A further 11 people identified as either teachers, students and one as an Education Administrator.
We know that there are 50,000 teachers, or 1.2% of the population. However in this “random” street survey, teachers or students make up nearly 16% of respondents.
What was the Herald doing? Standing in front of  schools?
Sure, according to the latest Household Labour Survey, 192,900 work in the education/training sector or 16% of the labour force are in education sector, but if you include students in your target population, as the Herald has done you’d expect much more than 16% of your sample to feature them.
The whole exercise is statistically irrelevant, the methodology flawed and the story ethically challenged. It just shows the extraordinary lengths the NZ Herald will go to these days to manufacture stories.

Oh dear. What do they teach these young journalists these days?

Anyway, this is shoddy journalism from the Herald, made worse by the fact that a blogger has blown the whistle on the story simply by doing a bit of basic research; research that should have been done by the author of the story. Those who once made the Herald the premier newspaper in the country will again be turning in their graves.