Page 431 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

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

provide the informational context on which our opinions are based. So, for ex-
ample, if we think, on the basis of what we read, that immigration is running at
unsustainably high levels and is a major burden on public services, we are more
likely to support efforts to curtail it. Or if we repeatedly see experts telling us
that a foreign government poses a serious and imminent threat to the security
of the world, we are more likely to support military intervention against that
government.
An intelligent reading of polling data will acknowledge this, and in cases
where media coverage is prominent and germane to the question being asked,
polls may be as much a measure of the influence of the news media as anything
else. This understanding is increasingly informing opinion research, which is
beginning to explore the links between knowledge and opinion. For it is here
that we are most likely to see the ideological play of media influence: the media
may not foist opinions upon us, but they provide an informational climate which
makes some opinions more tenable than others.
Work by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the Uni-
versity of Maryland has explored the way in which misunderstandings about
foreign policy have developed, and we can see how those misunderstandings
have shaped public opinion. So, for example, in 2003, their research found that
a number of erroneous assumptions about Saddam Hussein were widespread
among the U.S. population, and these assumptions clearly informed the case for
war with Iraq. Similarly, the U.S. group Retro Poll, run by citizen activists, car-
ries out polls exploring the relation between assumptions and attitudes, partly to
demystify conventional wisdom in the mainstream news media.
In sum, the technology of polling is a useful way of finding out what people
within a society think and assume about the world. But the political economy
of polling and its dependence upon the news media mean that many polls are
not primarily there to do this. The first question we should ask of polls is not to
quibble about sampling, but as to who commissioned and designed them, and
to what end.

TowarD a morE DEmoCraTiC usE oF oPinion PoLLs

The media and politicians are sometimes accused of paying too much at-
tention to polls, thereby pandering to a kind of unprincipled populism. There
is, however, very little evidence for this. Politicians certainly use polls, but this
generally has more to do with market research than a desire to do the people’s
bidding. Polls are more likely to inform matters of presentation rather than
matters of policy.
The media use of polls is also very far from being a tale of slavish adherence.
Research suggests that journalists tend to use polls less as a form of genuine en-
quiry than to bolster the prejudices of the newsroom. So, for example, King and
Schudson describe how, during the Reagan era, journalists assumed their own
impressions of the president—as affable and likeable—were held by a majority
of the public. They thereby ignored a great deal of polling evidence to the con-
trary, focusing only on those snippets that supported their assumptions.