COMM 150: Polls ... exercise ... and revised assignments for the rest of the week [reposting with course number corrected]

This week we'll take up Chapters 12 and 13 in John Vivian's "Media of Mass Communication," on research and "mass media effects" respectively. Research, to communications professionals, means public opinion polling and market research; Monday we'll look at public opinion polls. Wednesday we'll see how polling applies to advertising, and we'll study demographics, which is the basis of most market research. Friday, we'll whiz through Vivian's discussion of media "effects" in Chapter 13, i.e. several theories of the effect the media have on society. Please complete assignment for Wednesday, by analyzing the two political polls linked below and posting your analysis as a comment to this blog item.

While public opinion polls are used to gauge public attitudes toward everything from religious preference to bath salts and after-shave lotion, they come for the most scrutiny in public affairs. Like practically everything else in American politics, a lot of the scrutiny is negative.

Especially negative is the attitude toward political polling, and news reporting that emphasizes poll results - who's ahead, who's behind, who's winning, who's losing - instead of explaining public policy issues.

"The news media are more obsessed than ever with the horse-race aspects of the presidential campaign, according to a new study," reported the New York Times, for example, on Oct. 29, 2007, when the 2008 campaigns were about at the same stage as today's race. "Despite the campaign’s early start, the media have not been more reflective on the issues, the study said, but have focused on tactics and strategy."

Summarizing a poll by the Pew Research Center, and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Catharine Seelye of the Times noted that:

1. Nearly two-thirds of all stories (print, television, radio and online) focused on "political aspects of the campaign, while only 1 percent focused on the candidates’ public records."
   
2. She added, "Only 12 percent of stories seemed relevant to voters’ decision making; the rest were more about tactics and strategy.

Seelye concluded, "The campaign coverage has been sharply at odds with what the public says it wants, the study found, with voters eager to know more about the candidates’ positions on issues and their personal backgrounds, more about lesser-known candidates and more about debates. But the media is even more obsessed this time around with questions of tactics and strategy, despite what the study described as a 'generational struggle' in both parties. Horse-race stories accounted for 63 percent of reports this year compared with what the study said was about 55 percent in 2000 and 2004."

Two years later, on Aug. 30, 2009, New York Times blogger Paul Krugman complained about "reporting that focuses on how policy proposals are supposedly playing, rather than what’s actually in them."

At the time, Congress was debating President Obama's health care legislation. But Krugman noted that during the 2004 presidential campaign he "looked at TV reports on health care plans, and found not a single segment actually explaining the candidates’ plans." He said, "It’s easier to research horse-race stuff. To report on policy, a reporter has to master the policy issues fairly well. That’s not easy, especially for journalists who have specialized in up close and personal rather than wonkery — and policy issues change from year to year. To do a horse-race piece, you just call up the usual suspects on your Rolodex, and have a bunch of 'one Democratic insider said' quotes." Krugman added, "The upshot, of course, is that we’re having a crucial national policy debate in which the great bulk of the news coverage tells people nothing at all about the policy issues."

Is it any wonder that in August 2011 the online magazine GOOD could run an article on the health care law headlined "Most Americans Still Have No Idea What the Health Care Law Does?"

And horse-race journalism is still all around us.

Just Saturday, respected political reporter Carla Marinucci of the San Francisco Chronicle quoted Republican political strategist Patrick Dorinson, who writes TheCowboyLibertarian.com political website, saying Republican presidential candiate Rick Perry "is not a guy I'd bet on" after a gaffe in which he couldn't remember the third of three agencies he proposes to eliminate.

"He came out to the horse track and he was a beautiful colt, but no one had ever seen him run," Dorinson told Marinucci. "Now, we're seeing the mules running faster than he is."

So horse-race reporting is alive and well.

And stories based on public opinion polling, for better or worse, are with us to stay.

Vivian has a fairly good explanation of how polls are conducted in your weekend reading assignment, and Gary N. Curtis, author of the Fallacy Files weblog has an explanation of how to interpret a pollthat fills in some important gaps. Curtis taught philosophy at UIPUI (the University of Indiana-Purdue University at Indianapolis, also known as "ooey pooey") who has worked in artificial intelligence for Cycorp Inc. in Austin, Texas. Curtis says:

Every other year, during election campaigns, the American public is polled, surveyed, and canvassed for their opinions, and the news media continuously inform us of the results. The media report polls in the same breathless way that race track announcers describe horse races: "As they round the corner of the convention, the Republican is pulling ahead on the right! Now, they're entering the home stretch and the Democrat is pulling up on the left!" Et cetera.

There is little drama in simply waiting until after the election to report the results. Instead, reporters use polls to add suspense to their coverage, with a leader and an underdog to root for. Moreover, every news outlet is trying to scoop the others by being the first to correctly predict the winner. Unfortunately, much of this coverage sacrifices accuracy for artificial excitement.

This article explains how a layman can read a news report of a poll without being duped by the hype. You don't need to be a statistician to understand enough about polls to not be taken in, because the problems are often not with the polls themselves but with the way that they're reported. ...

Very true. If you know how to read them, polls can tell you a lot.

And Curtis is all about showing us how to read them. Curtis even has a little poll of his own for us. Let's put it up on the screen in class, take the poll and read the rest of his explanation. At the end, he'll tell us how we did.

I'll disqualify myself because I took it Sunday afternoon. (No, I didn't answer all the questions correctly!) But I'll record the answers as you come to consensus on the questions.

Then, after we read the rest of Curtis' post on how to evaluate a poll, I have linked below two stories based on polls in the Republican presidential primary campaign. Please evaluate the stories, using the criteria on Curtis' blog and in Vivian, and post your comparisons as comments to this item. Which is better? Why do you say so? How does each stack up? The polls are:

• Miami Herald Friday Nov. 11, which reports, "The Republican presidential race is being shaken up again, with Mitt Romney retaking the lead, Newt Gingrich surging into second place, and Herman Cain dropping to third place, according to a new McClatchy-Marist nationwide poll released Friday." McClatchy is the newspaper chain that owns the Herald, and Marist College is in New York state.
  
• New York Daily News Sunday Nov. 13, reported:
  

  Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich were the big winners after a week of self-inflicted wounds among GOP contenders, a new poll found.
  
  Romney and Gingrich each gained five points in a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of Republican primary voters released Sunday. ... The support for former Massachusetts Gov. Romney among re-interviewed voters rose from 27% to 32%, and Gingrich's rose from 17% to 22%. Gingrich's resurrection was attributed to consistently good debate performances.