Exploring the Liaison
Between Polling
and the Press
ALBERT E. GOLLIN
episode in the quadrennial rites by which Americans choose their political leadership is drawing to a close at this writing. The primaries produced two presidential candidates, whose victories were ultimately certified by party conventions. They were joined by a maverick independent whose candidacy was buoyed up by the uncertainty or disappointment felt by an appreciable segment of voters over the choices confronting them. Rep. John Anderson, it was claimed during the primaries, was a serious candidate because he had demonstrated significant appeal to voters. But how had he done so? Not by his unimpressive vote totals in the few Republican primaries that he entered. Rather, it was the polls that initially documented his appeal to the satisfaction of leading media political correspondents, who confirmed his status in their reporting. And it was also the polls that were chosen by the League of Women Voters to play a prime gatekeeping
A N o r H E n
Abstract Polling has taken on new dimensions with the upsurge of press-conducted polls and surveys. This diffusion of polling technology raises a number of issues for the press, for the institution of public opinion polling, and for politics and policy making. News creation by polls offers the press some opportunities for altering and extending traditional modes of coverage of politics. But it poses some dangers as well, which deserve close attention. Albert E . Gollin, guest editor of this symposium, is Vice President and Associate Director of Research at the Newspaper Advertising Bureau, Inc., New York, and Associate Secretary-Treasurer of AAPOR. He wishes to express his gratitude to Eleanor Singer, Editor of POQ, for the strong support she provided to him as Guest Editor, and to Randi Levine for her many editorial contributions to this symposium. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 44:445-461 Published by Elsevier North-Holland, Inc.
1980 by The Trustees of Columbia University
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role in deciding that he could appear in the fall TV debates.' Thus, unlike other "serious" independent candidates for the presidency in this century, who had established their claims by prior vote-getting, in 1980 an independent had his candidacy assessed as significant primarily by the results of opinion polls generated by or channeled through the mass media and widely accepted as accurate by strategic elements of the political system. This development signified a new stage in the evolving role of opinion polling in American politics, and it offers further dramatic evidence of the centrality of the mass media in our national political life. The changing structure of American politics-a consequence (among other factors) of party reforms, demographic shifts, volatile economic conditions, and the impact of events (Vietnam, Watergate)-has progressively loosened the grip of power brokers on presidential candidate selection, and polls and the news media have stepped in to fill the vacuum. If the press-here meant to include both print and broadcast news media-has become more of a Fourth Estate in fact, then polls can be said to be one of its sharpest swords. As will be suggested presently, however, this sword is two-edged. The papers in this symposium examine various aspects of the linkages that have slowly been forged between polling and the press across several decades. To lend perspective on the symposium's objectives and the contributions of its authors, let me provide a few details about its genesis. Along with other opinion researchers, I have for many years found the increasingly prominent role of polls and surveys in American politics and government to be both gratifying and unsettling. These reactions were sharpened by a variety of personal experiences in the 1960s and 1970s in Washington, D.C.: as a policy researcher, as a political activist-pollster in a series of local and national elections, and as a survey consultant to the Washington Post and other local media (Gollin and Dixon, 1975). From these experiences I gained additional insights into the uses and limits of these social science technologies as seen by politicians, newsroom gatekeepers, and government officials alike. Although the verdict on the applicability of social science to public policy formulation has been mixed, as even the most cursory glance at the sizable literature on policy and evaluative research would The serious problems raised by the League's decision were quickly pointed out, publicly and privately, by members of the National Council on Public Polls and the Council of Applied Social Research Organizations. For criticisms made by polling professionals, see Cantril (1980b) and Hart (1980). This important episode in the history of polling deserves to be fully documented.
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reveal, practical politics and media coverage of news about politics and society are two sectors in which social scientists' claims of relevance seem to have found especially sympathetic ears. How can one account for such differing degrees of success that polls have achieved? What are the implications: for polling and social science utilization more generally, for politics and politicians, for the news media, and for the wider society? And whose interests are served by these trends? In the 1970s news organizations, large and small, began to enter the lists as polling agencies in rapidly increasing numbers (Dionne, 1980a; Rippey, 1979). Their own polls largely echoed the topical coverage provided by the nationally syndicated polls-Gallup, Roper, Harris-but they extended opinion soundings down to the local level, providing periodic reports on public attitudes, beliefs, and behavior that varied widely in depth, balance, and degree of sophistication in the handling of poll data. A new type of journalism, one that made use of social science tools and concepts, was being grafted onto the stock of traditional modes of reporting. This trend was defined and promoted by Philip Meyer in his book Precision Journalism (1973), which gained a wide audience and helped to launch a "movement" in journalism schools and among the working press (Ismach, 1979). Meyer was not alone in seeing how the social sciences could be adapted for use by journalism. Others were showing a heightened awareness of the need for journalism education and reporting practices to incorporate newer perspectives and technologies (including those offered by the social sciences) in an era of rapid change (ANPA Foundation, 1974; Weaver and McCombs, this issue). Polls had, of course, long been a pfess feature, primarily in the form of syndicated polls that enjoyed added popularity in election years (Crespi, this issue; Roll and Cantril, 1980). But now newsgathering organizations were not simply printing or broadcasting the findings of others. Instead they were creating news on their own initiative by the spotlight they shone on topics of their own choosing and the news values or "frames" (Tuchman, 1978) that shaped their phrasing of questions and responses in measuring public opinion. This development seemed to me to place the news media in a new and more exposed position, when seen in light of their traditional, more dependent relationship to authoritative news sources (Sigal, 1973; Roshco, 1975; Gans, 1979; Von Hoffman, this issue). In 1979, Eleanor Singer invited me to organize for POQ a symposium on the increasingly intimate liaison between polling and the press, to address the numerous questions that this liaison has raised:
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What have been the prime sources of this growing liaison? How has it affected the definition of facts, news, and interpretation among working journalists? How have the polls reshaped modes of coverage of traditional beats? What has been the influence on this trend of the rise of the new social sciences in the postwar era, with their pervasive impacts on the way society is viewed and on how one can learn about social facts and processes? "Public opinion," whatever that phrase once meant, now is taken by most people most of the time to mean poll findings. What are the effects upon society of the availability of data on public attitudes and behavior of the most varied, detailed sort? Do polls have feedback effects on definitions of the society itself? Do poll results affect perceived levels of consensus or conflict by their manner of reporting? Do demographic group analyses conduce to an image of a cohesive or fractionated social system? Over time, does such reportage make poll-delineated reference groups more salient for individuals, helping people to define themselves more consistently as group members and to act on these definitions? What are the effects on policy makers or the public of poll results that deal with complex issues with what might be termed spurious precision? The polls are ever more influential for policy makers, in public and private sectors alike. "Tracking" is a big and growing business. With more people getting into the act, discrepant results are increasingly likely to be publicized. What might be the effects of poll proliferation on both politics and the future of polling? One problem of presidents in recent decades has been the continuous "phantom elections" represented by polls that match the incumbent with potential opponents. What are the effects of these "realtime" assessments of prestige and popularity on presidential authority? The papers in this symposium deal with only a few of these questions. Our goal has been to advance the process of systematic inquiry into aspects of a relationship that has been the source of much comment but only limited study. Much more remains to be done, and many of the papers offer suggestions of fruitful lines of investigation. Rather than risking a preemption of readers' reactions to my collaborators' contributions by attempting to summarize their major findings or arguments, I shall limit my comments to a few issues raised by the liaison between polling and the press that seem to me especially problematic for both institutions, and that deserve thoughtful consideration by opinion researchers and journalists.
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Polls as Pseudo-Events: News Creation and Its Effects on the Public
Twenty years ago, Daniel Boorstin added a powerful new concept to the American lexicon, one grounded in the history of journalism and mass persuasion. In the first chapter of his book The Image (1961), entitled "From News Gathering to News Making," he defined the pseudo-event as a synthetic piece of news that is "planned, planted, or incited" specifically in order to be reported, whose ambiguity of meaning is intrinsic to its interest, and that often has the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. He cites as the earliest case in point the personal interview, a contrivance of nineteenth-century journalism that was born of the need to fill space in the multiple editions that technological advances had made possible. After listing eight ways in which pseudo-events have the power to overshadow spontaneous events, he concludes, "By this new Gresham's law of American public life, counterfeit happenings tend to drive spontaneous happenings out of circulation. . . . Once we have tasted the charm of pseudo-events, we are tempted to believe they are the only important events" (pp. 40, 44). Later he scores public opinion polling for offering images of "public opinion . . . [that are] synthetic, believable, passive, vivid, concrete, simplified, and ambiguous as never before" (p. 233), and ominously concludes: Having been polled as a representative of the public, [the citizen] can then read reports and see how he looks. As polls become more scientific and detailed-broken down into occupations, counties, income groups, religious denominations, etc.-the citizen can discover himself (and the opinions which he "ought" to have or is likely to have). . . . Public opinion--once the public's expression-becomes more and more an image into which the public fits its expression. . . . It is the people looking into the mirror [p. 2381.
Boorstin's critique bears centrally on one hypothesized attribute of press and other polls: their capacity to distort people's perceptions of politics and social life, and press news coverage, moving them ever farther away from what both might be in the absence of public polls. In this journal, for example, Broh writes of "pseudo-events that are created by the media, and whose effects on poll results are then analyzed by the self-same media for clues to the dynamics of a campaign." Crespi refers to a "feedback loop, in which (1) definitions of what is news (2) determine the content of polling, which (3) affects the political process, (4) which then becomes news. . . . Editors await the latest poll report on the president's popularity expectantly. . . . However, it is the news media themselves that create what they await." Von Hoffman also follows Boorstin (without attribution-so
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much has his concept become common property) by terming polls pseudo-events that "give news companies the power to make every day election day. [Newspeople] believe that the noise they hear in the conch shell their pollsters hold up to their ears is the true, genuine and unadultered vox populi." And Kovach wonders "if we are feeding each other. A poll suggests an issue, to which there is a political response, which is then reported and another poll is taken . . . beginning a sort of chain reaction." All these analysts are in various ways dealing with an issue of vital concern to the press, to polling as a mode of knowledge production, and to the political process: the transforming of politics as an aspect of people's experiences, and of substantive treatment of political events and processes by the press. Public opinion becomes, in this view, largely a symbolic, statistical commodity purveyed by public opinion polls, rather than an active social process through which citizens define and collectively shape the course of public issues (Davison, 1958). A further implication is that, over time, people's political beliefs and behavior have been affected by the evidence of polls presented by the press-a special case of the larger claim of the mass media's agenda-setting functions (McCombs and Shaw, 1972; Shaw and McCombs, 1977). Such feedback effects of polls are seductively easy to propose or entertain as possibilities, but difficult to assess. For example, have poll findings conveyed by the press contributed to the political malaise that has characterized American public opinion in recent years, reflected in low voting rates and widespread alienation and mistrust? It is hard to see poll findings as a significant cause of low levels of voting, a collective phenomenon that clearly has deep historical roots that are structural in nature (Johnson, 1980). And to treat polls as a cause of political alienation would amount to blaming the messengers for the bad news. Yet, as with the mass media generally, which, despite some disclaimers (Patterson and McClure, 1976; Patterson, 1980), have increasingly been assigned a powerful role in shaping political beliefs and behavior and altering the political process, press-conducted or publicized polls can conceivably affect people's orientations to politics. But any potential effects of public poll information on opinions or behavior depend, it can be suggested, on the realization of at least three preconditions: awareness, credibility, and an identification with the consensus or group variations revealed by poll findings. Let us explore these further. First, how aware is the public of the phenomenon of polling? In analyzing this and the other two preconditions, it must be said at the
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outset that few data exist to help us with our exploration. A few years ago, Biderman scanned the literature seeking data on public conceptions of surveys and polls and concluded, "The public opinion research profession constitutes a notorious case of the barefoot shoemaker" (197551). Only a minority of the public (between 15 and 35 percent) has had a chance to gain personal knowledge about polling by being interviewed (Gallup poll in 1975; National Research Council, 1979:47-54). By way of contrast, the degree of acquaintance with polls or surveys, largely channeled through the mass media, has been growing and is currently fairly widespread. In 1944, for example, when syndicated polls were being published in only a relatively few newspapers and magazines, Goldman found that 44 percent of a national sample had never heard or read about them and another 28 percent did not "follow the results of any public poll" (Goldman, 1944). Thirty years later, in two parallel surveys conducted nationally in the heat of the 1976 campaign, only 16 percent failed to recall hearing something "in the news or in talking with friends" about "polls showing how candidates for office are doing." But this seemingly high (84 percent) degree of public familiarity with polls is tempered appreciably by the fact that 26 percent believed that such polls were conducted by some agency of government (National Research Council, 1979:62, 21 1). If superficial awareness of polls has grown sizably, how much appeal do they seem to have for their intended news audiences? Again, the direct evidence on this question is meager. Goldman found that only 19 percent of his 1944 national sample said they followed the published polls "regularly." In 1979, Meadows found 34 percent of a statewide sample in Kentucky who "very often" pay attention "to the results of polls such as the Gallup Poll or the CBS News Poll" (Meadows, 1980). From these scattered findings on poll familiarity and appeal, one can at least entertain a suspicion that polling has not achieved a clearly defined status or evoked strong interest in the minds of most Americans, despite the barrage of results to which they have been regularly exposed via the news media. The evidence as to the credibility of poll findings is equally slim. Gallup's 1975 poll found 9 percent of the public rating the polls' accuracy in elections as "excellent," and 41 percent who felt it was "good"; another 29 percent had no opinion. These results did not vary substantially from those found by a 1965 Gallup poll, in which the corresponding figures were 10, 36, and 33 percent (Current Opinion, 1975). Trust in the results of surveys as being "almost always right" or right "most of the time" was expressed by 40 percent of sampled respondents in the two matched nationwide surveys cited
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earlier (Turner and Krauss, 1978:468). Lipset (1976) reported that, depending upon the label used-public opinion polls, public opinion pollsters, election polls-around 16 percent of a small national sample of adults questioned in 1975 said they had "a great deal of confidence," and another 55 percent "a moderate amount of confidence" in them. (Data from that survey made available at the 1979 AAPOR annual meeting showed that polls and pollsters shared the same general degree of confidence given to "business leaderslbig business," "union leaderslbig labor," and "advertising/advertising agenciesHwell below the confidence bestowed upon "doctors," "the military," or other professions.) As judgments such as these were solicited in the midst of a personal interview survey, they may have been partially affected by "courtesy bias," and probably can be taken as placing public trust in poll accuracy in its best light. Such results, while generally favorable, hardly constitute a ringing public endorsement of poll findings as facts that carry conviction. And the signs of rising public resistance to surveys in recent years offer clues of another sort as to the perceived worth of polls and surveys among the general public, although other factors cloud the value of this as a direct indicator of such sentiments (Reinhold, 1975, Biderman, 1975; Bailar and Lanphier, 1978; National Research Council, 1979). It is intriguing to think that poll findings as uniquely packaged data about mass or group sentiments may affect opinions or behavior, by activating or reinforcing reference group ties or by persuasively evoking the tyranny of the statistical majority, but so far this is an empirically unsupported hypothesis. Earlier concerns with "bandwagon" or "underdog" effects of poll findings, or reports of actual voting, on people's voting behavior have faded away for lack of supporting evidence (Mendelsohn and Crespi, 1970; Roll and Cantril, 1980:25-29).2 F'ublic and private poll data do affect politics in many ways-for example, candidate and campaign decisions, and the flow of resources vital to electoral success-but such effects remain largely hidden from public view, unless the press learns about them and makes them a feature of its political coverage. But based on the admittedly skimpy evidence available, they do not appear to affect the electorate in any direct or predictable manner.3 Some European opinion researchers have debated the existence of "tactical voting" by the electorate, in which voters reward or punish candidates or officeholders by relying on (reacting to) published poll results in making voting decisions. While plausible, this aggregate-level explanation of voting patterns, especially of discrepancies between late poll projections and actual voting outcomes, has not been adequately demonstrated (Koschnick, 1980; Worcester, this issue). The evidence of a candidate's appeal or lack of support affects activists, especially
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If this is an accurate verdict in the cake of voting, an area in which poll effects have been avidly sought for years, then their effects in other attitude or behavior realms, suggested by Boorstin and other^,^ must be seen for the present to be even more conjectural. The study of such subtle effects poses extremely difficult problems: poll data, after all, constitute only a small slice of the large mass of information conveyed daily to the general public, whose interest in them would seem to be fairly casual and sporadic in any case. But with the increasing prominence of polls in political news coverage, and the high stakes involved for the press and the polling profession in such a possibility, the study of poll effects or of broader public orientations toward polling clearly deserves much more attention than these topics have so far attracted. Polling and the Politics of Public Opinion
The distorting effects of polling on political coverage of elections and issues, and ultimately on various aspects of politics and policy making, are among the most popular themes of analysts of the presspolling liaison. Several related strands of this general critique can be identified. First is the claim that press-conducted or published polls mainly emphasize superficial aspects of public opinion, for example, by their focus on horse-race journalism in election coverage, or their peremptory pro-con assessments of public opinion on complex issues of public policy. This claim underlies many specific concerns that have been expressed about the misuse or untutored use of polling by the press, such as the treatment of sampling error or other technical problems, bias in question wording or response formats, the soliciting of "opinions" when knowledge or conviction are absent, or telescoped presentation of findings. Correctives have been increasingly proposed by pollsters, scholars, and journalists as the volume of public polls has swelled (Rambo, 1980; Roll and Cantril, 1980; Roper, 1980; Rippey, 1979). Among these proposals are treating poll data as supplementary rather than central to media political coverage (Germond, 1980); better training of poll reporters and editors (Wilhoit and Weaver, 1980; campaign workers, and investors. Effects on voters' decisions, while possible, are harder to discern. But as Edward Tufte has noted in this regard, "The absence of evidence is not necessarily the evidence of absence" (Quoted in Dionne, 1980b). As one further illustration, polling critic Von Hoffman (1976) has claimed that "polls teach the populace a static and rigidified concept of society, a concept that seriously overestimates the importance of individual decision making. . . . Poll-taking and poll information dissemination becomes [sic] a device for strengthening the status quo."
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MacDonald, 1978); intensified educational efforts by professional groups such as AAPOR, the National Council of Public Polls, and the Council of Applied Social Research Organizations; closer press ties with scholars and professional pollsters (Wheeler, 1980; NoelleNeumann, this issue); greater emphasis on detailed analysis and interpretation in context (Wheeler, 1980); and the establishment of a professional monitoring agency that can provide continuous comment and criticism-by pollsters themselves, if necessary (Field, 1979; Ladd, this issue). These ameliorative changes in the treatment of polls by the press would unquestionably yield a better-crafted product in which poll findings would figure as only one strand of a more richly textured fabric of political reporting and analysis. But it may not be easy for the press to accept and act on such suggestions, given a second strand of criticism, embodied in the analyses of Crespi and Ladd in this issue and others elsewhere (Cantril, 1976; Roper, 1980; Roll and Cantril, 1980:xxix-xxxix). These writers focus on certain imperatives intrinsic to daily journalism that largely determine how the press makes use of polls. Some of the key factors shaping current uses of polls are conceptions of "news," space or time constraints, low levels of investment made in poll operations, the stress on generalists and on journalists' job mobility (limiting the likely emergence of polling specialists), and the presumed low level of audience interest in detailed poll findings. These institutional considerations would seem to limit the play of impulses toward self-reform among the press. A third related strand in the critique of press-polling relationships has mainly to do with the wisdom or propriety of polling by the press, which has significantly altered its coverage of political topics and policy issues in obvious and subtle ways. In its narrowest sense, the assertion is made that a news organization that conducts its own polls creates the appearance of a conflict of interest, one that can lead to a restriction on the reporting of polls conducted by others (Roper, 1980). In its broadest sense, however, this critique sees press polls as reflecting or contributing to a serious misapprehension of the nature of public opinion-polling's crucial legitimating concept-and its ideal or actual relationship to representative democratic institutions and policy processes. From this perspective, polling by the press has become embroiled, perhaps unwittingly, in a long-standing controversy over opinion polling: its naive use as a plebiscitarian substitute for legislative or electoral expressions of public opinion, or its promotion as a flawed, inadequate guide for public policy (Lynd, 1940; Blumer, 1948; Rogers, 1949; Wheeler, 1976; Ladd, this issue). This controversy is too well
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known to need rehearsal here. One need only note that in focusing its polling efforts on the realm of politics, the press is fol1owing.a deeply etched path in the history of opinion research. The vast majority of historical poll data deals with political topics and issues (Cantril and Strunk, 1951; Gallup, 1972; Gallup, 1978). And survey techniques and poll findings have had their deepest scholarly impacts on the study of political beliefs, behavior, and public policy issues (Boyd and Hyman, 1975). In both these senses, the press is a legatee of a tradition that has, for better or worse, transformed our view of politics and public opinion (Lazarsfeld, 1957; Benson, 1967). One aspect of this old debate has, it seems to me, been fundamentally altered by 40 years of experience with polling. Public opinion as reflected in the polls has been restricted by partial incorporation: it is something to be courted, persuaded, or countered-not followed. Poll findings, apart from their great strategic value in the pursuit of elective office, mainly offer guidance about timing, tactics, or appeals to be used in promoting, attacking, or defending policies. Even if disposed to follow public opinion faithfully, sophisticated policy makers and bureaucrats rarely find in the evidence of polls a recognizable depiction of the complex issues confronting them or of the constraints within which decisions must be made (Yarmolinsky, 1963; Cohen, 1973; Cantril, 1980a:131-65). To the extent that the press offers its polls as valid, goal-defining expressions of "the true, genuine and unadulterated vox populi" (Von Hoffman, this issue) it is indulging in an irrelevant plebiscitarian fantasy. Few news organizations that conduct or prominently feature polls would, I believe, accept this as either an accurate or adequate description of their purpose in doing so. They have (or should have) the history of polling controversies and of the very modest successes polls have enjoyed in the policy arena to draw upon in justifying their investment in polls. Indeed, considering their restricted value in that arena and the limited appeal of polls to news audiences, one might well ask why press polls have proliferated so widely. As many of the papers in this symposium suggest, the answers to this question must be sought within journalism itself: in the news values that poll findings manifest, irrespective of audience considerations. The latter typically play only a relatively minor role in editorial news judgments (Gans, 1979; Bogart, 1980). Besides the obvious news values polls have for political coverage, the precision journalism movement has derived added force from the reinvigorated, postWatergate roles of debunkers and watchdogs being played by the press. From this perspective, I suggest, the contributions made by press polls, while modest, seem attractive and significant.
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Polls are a powerful tool for use against the powerful: political brokers, image manipulators, and officials who themselves make frequent use of private and public polls. Polls enable the press actively and independently to define or divine public opinion, as a counterweight to polls taken by others for their own purposes, and to publicize and keep a box score on the success of mass persuasion tactics inspired in part by such polls. Press polls can also test the claims of public support made by spokesmen for diverse interests, nationally or locally. In these and other ways, polling enables the press to intervene in the silent politics (Bogart, 1972) among leaders, would-be leaders, and the led. These useful functions of polling make it unlikely that the press will reduce or appreciably modify its reliance upon polls. Thus, the issues raised by critics of press polls, and of opinion polling generally, are likely to persist. There can be no doubt that the press is courting some added risks in its growing reliance on polling, some of which can affect the polling profession whose successes have inspired the proliferation of news polls. For one thing, poll proliferation virtually guarantees the production and dissemination of inconsistent or contradictory results, which in time can confuse or render more skeptical a poll-weary public. It can also materially reduce the value of poll findings as indicators of trends in public opinion that have some policy relevance. Another risk is that significant segments of the public will suspect that the press is actively pursuing its own agenda and departing unduly from news-gathering and reporting practices that accord with its professed ideal of "objectivity" (Roshco, 1975; Schudson, 1978; Tuchman, 1978; Gans, 1979). Advocacy polls, or "research events" as they have been called (King, 1979), can further contribute to this suspicion by multiplying appreciably the volume of poll findings injected into the public domain. Such suspicions, as Spiro Agnew's anti-media campaign illustrates, can readily be fanned by the powerful. The results would offer other instances of the operation of Gresham's Law: polling as an institution would be devalued, and the public's trust in the press would be lessened. Some of these dangers of proliferating polls have not been lost on a self-critical press (Dionne, 1980a; Rambo, 1980), nor upon opinion researchers with professional or commercial interests at stake (Field, 1980). Yet the boom in press polling continues unabated, with problems noted by critics being repeatedly encountered afresh. The experience with statewide political polling in the 1978 elections can serve as a case in point. The polls, public and private, were widely criticized in the press as misleading or inaccurate (Clymer, 1978; Kaiser, 1978;
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Columbia Journalism Review, 1979), and defended by only a few (Gergen, 1978; Plissner, 1979). The magnitude of the inaccuracies, with some notable exceptions (the senatorial campaigns of Clark in Iowa and McIntyre in New Hampshire), was not as dramatic as in the 1948 debacle. Yet despite these inaccuracies highlighted by the press, by 1980 the tempo of local and national polling by the press had quickened. The record of the polls in 1980 will probably be scanned more closely by the press because of the warning signals of 1978. But it is doubtful that anything less than a repetition of the 1948 experience will materially affect the expanding use of polls by the press. The press and the polling profession are, therefore, seated in the same lifeboat, with all the risks that additional passengers pose for its stability. The advent of new, speedier polling technologies only compounds the difficulties as they extend the practical value of polls (Worcester, this issue). Some of them exaggerate tendencies toward simplifying and stereotyping the measurement of public opinion, reducing it to a "bottom-line" expression that further caricatures the c o n ~ e p tThe . ~ values served in the past and currently by polling are, ironically enough, being threatened by the rapid diffusion and degradation of polling as an opinion research tool. The risks outlined here and the problems identified elsewhere in this symposium suggest that it would be desirable for the press-the newer enthusiasts of polling techniques especially-to moderate the pace of its pursuit of what Meyer (1973) has called "social science in a hurry," and to seek instead to draw more deliberately upon the theories, insights, skills, and experience that have accumulated in the field of public opinion research into which the news media have entered in such numbers and, with some notable exceptions, so poorly prepared.
References ANPA Foundation 1974 Education for Newspaper Journalists in the Seventies and Beyond: Proceedings of a Conference. Washington, D.C.: American Newspaper Publishers Association Foundation. The use of QUBE, an interactive TV-based system in Columbus, Ohio to test immediate public reactions to President Carter's July 15, 1979 "crisis of confidence" speech, is a harbinger (Seib, 1979). Other "instant-response" polling technologies have been developed which go beyond CAT1 systems by doing away with human interviewers altogether (Hicks and Dunne, 1980; Hakes, 1980). These devices carry the old Lazarsfeld-Stanton program analyzer idea to a reductio ad absurdurn in the field of opinion research.
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Bailar, Barbara A., and C. Michael Lanphier 1978 Development of Survey Methods to Assess Survey Practices. Washington, D.C.: American Statistical Association. Benson, Lee 1967 "An approach to the scientific study of past public opinion." Public Opinion Quarterly 3 1522-67. Biderman, Albert D. 1975 "The survey method as an institution and the survey institution as a method." Pp. 48-62 in H. Wallace Sinaiko and Laurie A. Broedling (eds.), Perspectives on Attitude Assessment: Surveys and Their Alternatives. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. Blumer, Herbert 1948 Public opinion and public opinion polling." American Sociological Review 13:542-49. Bogart, Leo 1972 Silent Politics: Polls and the Awareness of Public Opinion. New York: Wiley. 1980 "Editorial ideals, editorial illusions." Journal of Communications 29: 11-21. Boorstin, Daniel J. 1961 The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1978 edition). New York: Atheneum. Boyd, Richard W., and Herbert H. Hyman 1975 "Survey research." Pp. 265-350 in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby (eds.), Handbook of Political Science (vol. 7). Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. Cantril, Albert H. 1976 "The press and the pollster." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 427:45-52. 1980a Polling on the Issues: A Report from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Cabin John, Md.: Seven Locks Press. 1980b "The polls shouldn't govern the debate." New York Times, Sept. 7, Week in Review, p. 19. Cantril, Hadley, and Mildred Strunk (eds.) 1951 Public Opinion 1935-1946. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Clymer, Adam 1978 "For once, some polls were off, way off." New York Times, Nov. 19, Week in Review, p. 3. Cohen, Bernard C. 1973 The Public's Impact on Foreign Policy. Boston: Little Brown. Columbia Journalism Review 1979 "Battered polls." Columbia Journalism Review (January1 February):23. Current Opinion 1975 "Most Americans hold favorable attitudes toward opinion polls," Results from the Gallup Poll, October 3-6, 1975. Vol. I11 (November). Williamstown, Mass.: Roper Public Opinion Research Center. Davison, W. Phillips 1958 "The public opinion process." Public Opinion Quarterly 22:91-106.
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