…but this time, it wasn’t from Vermont Yankee. It was from Dr. George Till. Take it away, Dave Gram of the Associated Press:

A Vermont legislator and physician said Friday he believes he got tainted results from an online survey he took of fellow doctors to determine whether they support Gov. Peter Shumlin’s plan for a single-payer health care system. …

… Friday, Till said he’d learned that some respondents were non-physicians.

So after four days of generous news coverage, he admits the poll was problematic. But it’s a tightly-worded admission; he doesn’t acknowledge the fundamental problem, that the survey was posted online and could have been taken by anyone with Internet access. Instead, it implies that a couple of lawmakers somehow hacked their way into it. And implicitly blames the lawmakers for doing so.

Still missing from the story: how Till (and his UVM grad-student assistant) could be so clueless as to conduct a survey on a wide-open website.

Below the jump: Media hijinx!

I heard about Till’s admission on VPR, whose Saturday morning anchor was presumably reading a short piece from the AP broadcast wire. After hearing the report, I looked up the story online and found a couple of interesting tidbits regarding our state’s biggest newspaper.

Dave Gram’s story was posted on the Burlington Free Press website. It was also posted elsewhere. As a matter of fact, I first found his story on the website of a newspaper in Columbus, Indiana. In its version, the third paragraph of the story reads as follows:

The Associated Press did not report on the results when they were first released because the unscientific survey did not meet AP polling standards.

Funny thing: on the Freeps’ website, that entire paragraph was omitted. I guess that stuff about journalistic standards would have been a tad embarrassing.

Another little thing: The (truncated) AP story is in the Freeps’ news section. There’s also a post by reporter Terri Hallenbeck on the Freeps’ vt.Buzz political blog. Her blogpost is even more carefully couched than Gram’s AP story, and goes a little further in casting the blame on those dastardly Dems who pissed in George Till’s pool.

Friday, Till apparently learned that two lawmakers had gained access to the online survey and taken it themselves, including House Assistant Majority Leader Willem Jewett, D-Ripton, and Health Care Committee Vice Chairman Mike Fisher, D-Lincoln. I couldn’t reach Till on Friday afternoon, but those who were in the committee room Friday morning said he wasn’t happy about any of it, accusing lawmakers of skewing his survey.

That’s rich. He posts a survey on a wide-open website, then (reportedly) implies that Jewett and Fisher hacked in, and completely fails to acknowledge the survey’s fundamental flaws. And both he and Hallenbeck imply that Jewett and Fisher were the only people who skewed an otherwise valid survey.

Finally, the conclusion of Hallenbeck’s post is worth reading:

Here’s the rub: It doesn’t look good for those in House Democratic leadership to be going behind the back of their fellow lawmaker. At the same time, it indicates the survey was not completely sound.

Again, blame the lawmakers for taking a survey that was wide open. And make the thinnest possible admission about the unscientific survey — “not completely sound,” indeed.

Given all of this, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Till’s survey continue to be cited as valid and credible, even though it obviously is not.