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News Writing and Reporting for Today's Media, 7/e

Student Edition

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	Review Questions
	Exercise 12.1
	Exercise 12.2
	Exercise 12.3
	Exercise 12.4
	Exercise 12.5
	Exercise 12.6
	Exercise 12.7
	Exercise 12.8

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By the Numbers

Exercise 12.4

Students in the mass communication research class and the advanced reporting class at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill combine their efforts each year to produce and report a survey called The Carolina Poll. Many people profit: students in the research class have an opportunity to apply the theory they study; students in the reporting class have a chance to base their stories on fresh, relevant, computer-generated data; newspapers in the state that cannot afford to commission or conduct a statewide poll receive stories from the UNC News Bureau to publish; and readers in North Carolina are enlightened about contemporary issues. The following exercises in this section are based on stories written at and distributed by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The following information is from a telephone survey conducted from Feb. 17 through March 1 by journalism and political science students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Write a story based on the information.

     Some 1,209 adults were telephoned at random in the state of North Carolina. Interviewers asked this question: "Do you think abortion should be legal under any circumstances, should be legal only under certain circumstances or should never be legal?"
     The results of those who had an opinion: 19 percent said that abortion should be legal under any circumstances; 60 percent said under certain circumstances; 21 percent said that abortion should never be legal.
     At the 95 percent level of confidence, the sampling error of the poll is 3 percentage points.
     Professors Philip Meyer and Jane Brown supervised the poll, which is conducted two times a year by the UNC School of Journalism.
     The Carolina Poll had these additional findings: 83 percent of respondents in the 18–34 age group supported legal abortion; 79 percent of the 35–54 age group

supported legal abortion; 72 percent of those over age 55 supported legal abortion. Also, 85 percent of those who had at least a high school diploma supported legal abortion.
     It was noted that many respondents who said that abortion should be legal under certain circumstances said that they approved of abortion only in cases of rape or to save the woman's life.
     Results of other polls cited: A 1980 survey sponsored by the National Abortion Rights Action League showed that 83 percent of 1,000 Americans polled supported legal abortion. That poll's respondents were randomly chosen from voter registration lists and were asked the same question that appeared on the Carolina Poll.
     A 1980 Gallup Poll asked the same question. The sample was 1,948 adults nationwide. Seventy-eight percent supported legal abortion.

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