64% of primary schools will have a nativity play this year

This isn't really a opinion poll, but its the same sort of rubbish media reporting of surveys. The Sunday Telegraph had a survey at the weekend which claimed "only one in five schools are­ planning to perform a traditional nativity play this year." It showed no such thing.

The results showed 64% of the primary schools they surveyed were putting on a religious nativity play, the headlines about only one in five were based on taking only what they called "traditional" nativity plays, excluding all the modern versions. Personally you might find all the modernised musical nativity plays appallingly cheesy, but things like "Hosanna Rocks", "Whoops-a-Daisy Angel" and so on are nativity plays: they do involve angels, censuses, Bethlehem, Herod, baby Jesus being born in a manger and so on. They also sometimes involve bashful sheep, or stuck up angels or other peripheral nonsense or alternative POVs, but the core story is there. They might well be an affront to good taste, but not a threat to Christianity.

Why does it matter? Well, anyone reading the Sunday Telegraph story with a critical eye will have picked up the real picture, but after that people will quote the headlines and give a false picture. Mark Pritchard has an adjournment debate this week on 'Christianophobia' and is quoted as saying that the debate is particularly topical, "as recent findings suggested four fifths of schools were not staging nativity plays this year". There it goes - dodgy representation of survey findings and, two days later, we have a bit of misinformation happily ensconced in the debate that will probably crop up for years to come.