(FORTUNE Magazine) – In which the present writer, overriding negative feedback from his own informal readership surveys, goes right on clothing editorial comments in the ill-fitting habiliments of innocent questions: ) Given the recent New York Times survey showing that 56% of American blacks approve of President Reagan's job performance, but also given an entirely comparable Washington Post survey showing only 23% of blacks in an approbatory mode, and even allowing for the fact that both polls admit to margins of error (9% in the Times, 3% in the Post), are we maybe looking at a credibility hiatus for approval surveys, or is somebody now going to stand there and claim that a third of blacks changed their minds in the month between the two polls? ) With the evidence now suggesting that New York City is finally going to get a gay rights law, and with this prospect having been materially improved by certain amendments to the bill in question, the principal change being an explicit ban on affirmative action for gays, will somebody explain in words of one syllable why the presumed beneficiaries of the law should not receive preferential treatment in hiring just like other discriminatees, or in other words why are we discriminating against gays in civil rights legislation, and if the answer is that they are to a great extent unidentifiable, then isn't it obvious that to the exact same extent there is no problem requiring a ban on bias? ) In Ralph Nader's New York Times op-ed article boasting of the 20-year decline in automobile fatalities after legislation inspired by his 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed (the decline was from 5.3 deaths per 100 million vehicle * miles to 2.6), how come there is no mention of the even larger decline (from 11.2 per 100 million vehicle miles) in the previous 20 years, or is Ralph just another poor scrivener whose copy got cut? ) When if ever will the New York Times stop running editorials in support of the targeted jobs tax credit (it has recently run two), this being the loony federal program under which businessmen get a $4,500 tax credit for hiring people with various specified disadvantages in life (one qualifying disadvantage is a criminal record), and when will the aforesaid great paper stop claiming that the program is already creating 623,000 jobs, and above all when will it get around to the fascinating findings of Brookings scholar Gary T. Burtless, whose letter the paper gamely printed in January even though it learnedly cited exhaustive survey findings indicating that employers tended to think of workers eligible for the credit as ''damaged goods'' and that ''a job seeker known to be eligible for the credit was less likely to find work than an otherwise identical applicant . . .'' ) Before we celebrate ABC's latest foreign policy decision, which is to reverse its previous decision and press on with the miniseries called Amerika, even though production might offend the Bolshies and lead to the network's expulsion from Moscow, could we hear a bit more about the story line, which depicts America under Soviet occupation, but which the producer feels will, as the New York Times put it in an interview last fall, ''cause people to have a more moderate view of the Soviet Union, in part because the KGB colonel is portrayed . . . as an intelligent, sympathetic person.''