The victory of Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary amounted to a big loss for polling companies (and, by logical extension, TV ratings companies, as well). There was general agreement expressed in the media that if pollsters who had predicted that Barack Obama would win by double digits (USA Today/Gallup had him leading Clinton by 13 percentage points) could be proven so wrong despite massive surveys of the New Hampshire population, then the news media's insistence on reporting the election as if it were a horse race ought to be reassessed. As it became clear Tuesday night that the polls had been out-and-out wrong, veteran NBC-TV newsman Tom Brokaw, brought in as a special analyst of Tuesday's election, turned to colleague Chris Matthews and remarked, "You know what I think we're going to have to do? Wait for the voters to make their judgment." Matthews responded, "Well, what do we do then in the days before the ballot? We must stay home, I guess." No, said Brokaw, there were other matters to report about the election. "I think that the people out there are going to begin to make judgments about us if we don't begin to temper that temptation to constantly try to get ahead of what the voters are deciding."
I've told anyone who would listen that, in my opinion, it should be illegal to report on estimates. Any estimates can taint the next state(s) results, or cause people who haven't voted yet to stay home ( i.e., if they hear on the news that so and so has already won, then why go vote?).
I also think it should be illegal to report until a district is closed and is reporting the actual count. California is the most populous state, so has the most electoral college votes (I won't rant here about why the EC should be done away with), but we are at the tail end of voting districts due to being on the west coast. Many people can't vote until after work, but by then the President is often already "decided" by the media! And then they are shocked that the California (and WA, OR, AK, HI) voters don't turn out. Duh.
Of course, I've only been saying this since the '88 elections. I've written to a couple of news anchors about this issue and the replies I got back were, basically, "we have to report the news" and totally discounting my argument that they are fabricating news by reporting these poll results. Hopefully this issue will get more national coverage now that the pollsters were so badly off. Let's hope for some change.
FYI - Lou Dobbs, one of my favorite pundits on TV, had something to say about this, too. Article
If the media actually reported the news, I would not have an issue with their reporting election results. However, they hypothesize, predict, generalize, and lead the voters onto the path that has been chosen before the polling places open. I guffaw when the reporter prefaces the results with, "With 1% of the polling places counted, so-and-so has taken a commanding lead."
ReplyDeleteOh, give me a break!
There should be an 8-hour delay in reporting results just in case there is a problem.