SelasTürkiye Polling and the News Media by ALBERT E. GOLLIN

8/8/2019 SelasTrkiye Polling and the News Media by ALBERT E. GOLLIN

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Polling and the News Media S87

reflected in the pages of POQ and elsewhere. Nowadays, poll andsurvey data on matters of public interest are voluminous, timely, andubiquitous-all of which has lent them added force. A related change isthe steady growth in the number of polling agencies or sources thataccount for this embarrassment of riches. And although one constantsince 1937 has been the leading position played by the news media insponsoring and publicizing the results of polls, here, too, changes haveoccurred that deserve consideration in weighing the current status ofpolling.

The Mass Media Encounter PollsAt the dawn of the era of polls, the mass media-newspapers andcertain magazines-paid to gain access to the polling operations andresults of a few leading commercial pollsters. The Gallup Poll's syn-dicated columns (printed in more than 200 newspapers by the 1950s)were for several decades a primary source of poll data injected into thepublic domain. Mass-circulation magazines periodically made polls thecenterpiece of articles on various topics in the 1930s and subsequently.Roper, Crossley, Harris, Yankelovich and other eponymous polls alsogained recognition as their work entered the public domain via themedia. State polls gathered and made available additional public opin-ion data to the readers of their sponsoring daily newspapers. Andacademic social scientists began to gain access to resources that en-abled them to extend their work on attitudes by means of surveys ofrepresentative public samples (Cantril, 1944; Converse, 1987).

Slowly, a new public information and feedback system was beinginstituted, gradually supplementing or supplanting the individual andcollective indicators of popular sentiments and the legislative actionsthat had previously been accepted as valid manifestations of publicopinion. The press, finding polls to be a highly useful means of supple-menting their coverage of numerous topics, began to support polling asan integral feature of their news operations, instead of buying access tosyndicated polling data or sponsoring special polls. Thus, the press-the vital "organ" (shaper and mirror) of public opinion in standardtreatments of the topic-became inevitably a leading actor in theevolving polling enterprise.

This process was more discontinuous than the foregoing might sug-gest. Polling by the press prior to the 1960s was episodic, comparedwith its use of pollsters' services. But the growing use of polls bypolitical candidates and special interest groups strengthened the inter-est on the part of leading newspapers, an interest that may also havebeen whetted by their growing sense of competition with TV news


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S88 Albert E. Gollin

operations, especially in election coverage (Mendelsohn and Crespi,1970). The volume of poll results appearing in the press continued toexpand, a reflection not only of greater availability and the press'sweakness for handouts ("free" news) but also of the steady gain inrespect for polls among key figures in the press's environment (govern-ment and business in particular), which lent greater prestige to polling.

By the 1970s, therefore, a variety of influences flowed together toswell the demand for polling within the news media, "pulled" by thedemonstrated value of polls for political coverage in particular. Theeconomics of polling encouraged a sharing of costs, giving rise to thejoint polling operations of CBS News and The Ne w York Tim es, TheWashington Pos t and ABC News, and other media couples. Usuallythese involved a marriage of a print and a broadcast medium. At times,one or more newspapers within a state joined forces with a TV stationor with one another to cover an election or conduct a community poll.

If the news value of polls was the main cause of the growth of themedia polling enterprise, some social trends and technological im-provements greatly facilitated the process. A recent assessment ofsurvey research identified these generally influential factors: "In-creased literacy and numeracy . . . almost universal access to thetelephone . . . and increased power and decreased costs of automatedinformation processing" (Turner and Martin, 1984, 1:29).

Of these, the switch from face-to-face to telephone interviewing inthe field of opinion research was arguably the most consequential. Itbroke down a number of barriers to the spread of news polling. News-papers had telephone banks in their classified advertising or circulationoffices that could be used to keep polling costs down. Random digitdialing and WATS line service further facilitated the efficient conductof national or wide-area surveys. The advent of computerized dataanalysis and of CAT1 systems telescoped interviewing and data pro-cessing stages, and sped up the entire polling process. As a result, theturnaround time of a poll has shrunk from weeks (or months) in the1930s to hours in the 1980s.

A good indicator of the overall trend in news media polling, particu-larly as the media involved have long been models for emulation, canbe seen in Table 1. Since 1975 the CBS News and New York Timespolls, jointly and separately conducted, have expanded steadily innumber and reach. (In recent years, they have undertaken independentor cooperative polls in Grenada, Mexico, and Japan.) Moreover, thesheer number of polls is an imperfect indicator of their news value.Typically, a single poll will yield multiple news stories or feature arti-cles. The data also document the allure of state-level exit polls as aspecies of election polls-for a broadcast news service because theyyield timely results for use in election-night coverage, and for a daily


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Table I. CBS News & New York Times Polls: 1975-1986

Jointly Conducted CBS News Only N Y Times OnlyNational Other Exit National Other Exit National Other Exit Total

NOTE:NY Times summary excludes special-group surveys (e.g., athletes, conven-tion d elegates, MBAs).SOUR CES:arjorie Co nnelly, NY Times News Surveys; Keating Holland, CBSNews Surveys." One with the Los Angeles Times.One was in Grenada.Two were cross-national surveys; one was in Japan and U.S.One w as cross-national; one w as in Mexico.

paper because they offer rich analytical possibilities for next-day in-depth coverage. It should be noted that CBS News pioneered in exitpolling (Mitofsky, 1986).

News Polls: Strengths, Problems, RisksIf social changes and technological progress combined to make actualwhat was merely feasible, in diffusing the use and quickening the paceof polling, certain benefits and problems of news polls soon becameevident. One was the suspicion on the part of politicians, candidates,and political activists that the news media were thrusting themselvesforward and using polls to alter the public agenda in one way or an-other-"making news" rather than reporting it. Then too, conflictsarose whenever advocates claimed that public opinion supported somepolicy or position only to have a news poll controvert the claim. Andother accusations of improperly influencing the political process weremade, especially during preelection periods, when candidates were


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soliciting support by making claims about electibility, only to havetheir assertions (sometimes based on a secret poll) rudely blunted by apress poll.

One of the more sobering criticisms of media election polling wasdirected to exit polls. In this case, it was claimed that the outcomes ofelections had been altered by the fact that summary judgments aboutcandidates were being made available to prospective voters while thevoting places were still open. The presumed effect was greater uponraces in the western time zones, once the TV networks' election-nightcoverage had begun (Sudman, 1986). But in time, as local TV stationsincreasingly began to conduct exit polls and project or "characterize"local election outcomes, the complaints became more general. By 1984the controversy had become sufficiently heated that AAPOR devoted aplenary session to an examination of the issues (Milavsky et al., 1985).

Another problem accentuated by the proliferations of polls was thequality of the polling effort. Over time, given the stepped-up volume oflocal political polling by diverse organizations, a falloff in quality couldbe expected. As Crespi (1986) has shown in a recent study, this expec-tation appears to have been justified. He examined preelection pollsthat dealt with 446 state and local races (both primary and generalelections) and found an appreciable difference in quality in polls car-ried out by independent pollsters vs. media ones, and (linked with thisdistinction) in polls done by interviewers in full-service polling firmsvs. pickup interviewers hired by the media. In both cases, the formerachieved greater accuracy.

These polling context factors added to the explanatory value ofhigher (vs. lower) turnout elections, general (vs. primary) elections,and closeness to election day in accounting for variations in the accu-racy achieved by local polls. As Witt (1987) has shown, the record ofstate-level polls in 1986, compiled by a growing number of independentpollsters and news media, continued to be dogged by conflicting resultsand misleading forecasts.

Thus, it is clear that poll proliferation carries costs as well asbenefits, seen from a variety of standpoints. While many establishedpollsters and larger media polling agencies have shown organizationallearning in their polling efforts, many "newcomers" (especially localmedia polls) are compiling records that reflect no great credit uponthem. Moreover, inconsistent or contradictory results are the inevita-ble by-products of a proliferation of issue polls, and preelection pollsoften miss out on the dynamics or misstate the closeness of contests.

The risk that is posed by such a blemished record, as has long beenpointed out, is a devaluation of polling and survey research-not onlyin the estimation of strategic groups of sponsors and users but alsoamong the general public upon whose willingness to cooperate (by


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Polling and the News Media S9 1

sharing their views with strangers) the entire polling enterprise is ulti-mately dependent. For the news media whose polls prove to be mis-leading or errant as guides to the state of public opinion, the riskassumes another shape: a loss of public trust or credibility as newssources.

Regulating Polls and Educating the News MediaWhat are the counterweights to these threats to polling quality, which ap-pear to be correlated with easy entry into the field by poorly trained orinexperienced people, the expanding volume of polling activities, andthe growing appetite for polls as a news-gathering tool? Legal regula-tion, as a means of fostering professionalism and protecting the public,has always been one of the options. Were it to be successful in pre-scribing credentials for entry into the field and standards of acceptablepractice, presumably both the quality of polling and of its practitionerscould be controlled. And regulatory gestures have been made eversince the earliest years of polling as an infant industry. A bill wasintroduced in Congress in 1936 to regulate straw polls (Robinson,1937). A decade later, in the wake of the disastrous experience in the1948 elections, Gallup noted, "The question of government regulationof polls has come up in nearly every Congress during the last 20 yearsand is certain to be raised again in the eighty-first Congress" (Gallup,1948:733). The current wave of attempts to regulate telemarketingpractices is only the most recent assertion of a state prerogative withrespect to certain types of encounters with the public, which couldhave a potential spillover effect on public polling.

But in fact, as the pioneers of polling recognized, legal regulation hasbeen a fairly remote possibility given the First Amendment's protec-tions. The path of self-regulation was the preferred alternative, and itwas pursued fitfully through the promulgation of norms and standardsof professional conduct. It was hoped that these would exert peerpressure on active pollsters and socialize later entrants into the field.One strand of this effort-the specification of minimal disclosure stan-dards to be adhered to by public reporting agencies (i.e., pollsters andthe news media)-was meant to serve a mixed educational and controlfunction, by making the press and the public, over time, increasinglyaware of the scientific and craft elements that go into the proper con-duct of public opinion research (Roper, 1983), thus encouraging themto become more critical and demanding as sponsors or consumers ofpoll results.

The history of efforts made by AAPOR and other professional asso-ciations amply confirms the difficulty of devising clearcut standards


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S92 Albert E. Collin

applicable to all of the conditions under which polling is undertaken.Even the guidelines for minimal disclosure of polling methods, whileless contentious as an issue than were (and are) performance or pro-cedural standards, failed to win the assent of AAPOR members foralmost 20 years after their initial proposal in 1947. And it wasn't until1986 that these guidelines-formulated initially to assist polling firmsand news media disseminators of poll results-were revised and madean integral part of AAPOR's Code of Professional Ethics and Practices,binding upon AAPOR members as individuals (Gollin, 1988).

In 1968 the National Council on Public Polls began to promote addi-tional efforts at self-regulation as well as media education, initiallyunder the leadership of George Gallup and Arch Crossley, two veter-ans in the quest to elevate and reinforce polling standards. NCPPfocused its attention on the news media, organizing special seminarsand symposia on polling methods and applications prior to and aftermajor elections (Cantril, 1980). In time, these ad hoc activities weresupplemented by formal training sessions for journalists at universitycenters (e.g., Michigan, Connecticut) and by programs of press associ-ations in recognition of the special editorial responsibilities that theyassumed as polling agencies or users of poll data (Wilhoit and Weaver,1980; Gollin, 1983). But it remains doubtful that improvements in theaverage level of quality in the conduct and reporting of polls have keptpace with the rate of diffusion of polling across the news media.

In sum, the past 50 years have registered great progress in pollingmethods and practices and a concomitant growth in press and publicawareness of the value of poll results as measures of public opinionsand beliefs. But there remains a "clash of institutional imperatives"(Ladd, 1980) between the goals of surveys done for newsmaking pur-poses and those guided by academic, public policy, or other interests.As elements of the polling enterprise they have contributed signifi-cantly to the quantitative representation of public opinion that hasgained both currency and acceptance around the world. Yet, paradoxi-cally, the very success they have achieved has helped create condi-tions that could, if left unchecked, lead to their gradual decline.

Poll-wariness and resistance to surveys appear to be growing (Kohutet al., 1986; Milavsky, 1987). Much of this is the result of the explosivegrowth in the use of the telephone for sales promotion, and the steadyexpansion of commercial and governmental research activities. Bycomparison, news polling could be seen as more acceptable because itinforms or diverts a public whose views are gathered, refracted, andfed back to them by the media. But whatever contributes to a with-drawal of public. cooperation or to the degradation of polling qualitycan ultimately threaten the entire polling enterprise, and as we haveseen, the news media have not been blameless in this regard. The


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struggle to elevate and reinforce professional standards in opinion re-search is therefore likely to be as fateful for the status of public opinionresearch, including news polling, in the next 50 years as it has in thepreceding ones.

ReferencesCantril, Albert H., ed. (1980)Polling on the Issues. Cabin John, MD: Seven Locks Press.Cantril, Hadley (1944)Gauging Public Opinion. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Converse, Jean M. (1987)Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence 1890-1960. Berkeleyand Los Angeles: University of California Press.Crespi, Irving (1986)Accuracy in Pre-election Polling. (Unpublished report on a project sponsored by theNational Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation.)Gallup, George (1948)"On the regulation of polling." Public Opinion Quarterly 12:733-35.Collin, Albert E., ed. (1980)"Polls and the news media: A symposium." Public Opinion Quarterly 44(4).Collin, Albert E. (1983)"The election polls: What went wrong-and right?" The Bulletin of the AmericanSociety of Newspaper Editors. No. 656:24-26.Gollin, Albert E. (1988)"AAPOR and the media." In Paul B. Sheatsley (ed.), A History of the AmericanAssociation for Public Opinion Research (forthcoming).Kohut, Andrew, et al. (1986)"Is there a crisis of confidence?" Public Opinion Quarterly 50:l-41.Ladd, Everett Carl1 (1980)"Polling and the press: The clash of institutional imperatives." Public OpinionQuarterly 44574-84.Marsh, Catherine (1984)"Do polls affect what people think?" Pp. 565-91 in Charles F. Turner andElizabeth Martin (eds.), Surveying Subjective Phenomena, Vol. 2. New York:Russell Sage Foundation.Martin, L. John, ed. (1984)"Polling and the democratic consensus." The Annals, Vol. 472.Mendelsohn, Harold, and Irving Crespi (1970)Polls, Television, and the New Politics. Scranton, PA: Chandler.Milavsky, J. Ronald, et al. (1985)"Early calls on election results and exit polls: Pros, cons, and constitutionalconsiderations." Public Opinion Quarterly 49: 1-18.Milavsky, J. Ronald (1987)"Improving the public's opinion of public opinion." Public Opinion Quarterly51:436-47.Mitofsky, Warren J. (1986)"Polls and television news." Paper presented at an ESOMAR seminar, Strasbourg,

France, 26-28 November.Robinson, Claude (1937)"Recent developments in the straw-poll field (parts 1&2)." Public OpinionQuarterly 1 (3):45-56; (4):42-52.Roper, Bums W. (1983)"Some things that concern me." Public Opinion Quarterly 47:303-09.


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Sudm an, Seym our (1986)"Do exit polls influence voting behavior?" Public Opinion Quarterly 50:331-39.Turner, Charles F., and Elizabeth Martin, eds. (1984)Surveying Subjective Phenomena (2 vols.). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Wilhoit, G. Cleveland, and David H. We aver (1980)Newsroom Guide to Polls & Surveys. Reston: Am erican New spaper PublishersAssociation.Witt, Evans (1987)"Poll wars: Sta te polls in the 1986 election." Public Opinion 9 (5):41-43.

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SelasTürkiye Polling and the News Media by ALBERT E. GOLLIN