Page 430 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Publ c Op n on: Are Polls Democrat c? | 0

Polls and the ManuFaCtured Center
A common strain of journalistic thinking, in both the United States and the United Kingdom,
is that the broad mass of the public occupy a space somewhere to the right of the middle
of the road—a place that, in a kind of symbolic symmetry, is often referred to as “middle
England” or “middle America.” And while there are certainly issues where we find majority
opinion in precisely that space, it is notable how often polling data cast doubt on this as-
sumption. What we often find, instead, is that many aspects of the center/right policy lean-
ings favored by many political and business leaders have little majority support amongst the
general population.
In the United States, for example, large sections of the public are skeptical about many
features of the pro-business globalization model that both main parties generally adhere
to, while research suggests that if given information about the size of the military budget,
most would prefer cuts of a magnitude that few political leaders would dare contemplate.
In Britain, polls suggest little support for the gradual move towards the “reform” of public
services through privatization and (somewhat convoluted) market mechanisms. These di-
vergences between public and elite opinion are muffled by a conventional wisdom that as-
sumes a population symbolized by a mythic and metonymic “middle,” whose center/right
leanings we could expect to be sympathetic to globalization, militarism, and a pro-business,
privatization agenda.

them to do. During campaigns, polls are generally commissioned to inform a
well-rehearsed narrative about who is winning and what the outcome might be.
They are there to make news rather than to inform the democratic process, and
they tell us very little about what people actually think.

PoLLs anD ThE nEws mEDia

This raises a second, more general point: in the public sphere the news media
play a key role in mediating public opinion. It is not just that newspapers and
broadcast news outlets regularly commission polls; polling information is much
more likely to influence public policy or debate if it is in the public eye. The role
polls play in the political process depends upon, to a large extent, how conspicu-
ous they are. This means that polling information tends to become significant
only when it is regarded as newsworthy.
If polls are themselves a way of mediating public opinion, then their findings
are subject to another level of selection and interpretation by the news media.
These two forms of mediation can often overlap: opinion polls, especially those
conducted by news organizations, are often written around a news agenda. The
poll thereby feeds back the narrative of news, sustaining an impression of syn-
chronicity between the news world and public opinion.
A third issue follows from this. Our opinions about politics and public affairs
are based on a series of assumptions about the world, much of which comes
from the news media. The news media not only interpret polls for us, they