The Journalist: Friend or Foe?

Abstract

If there is conflict between the aims of the journalist and the aims of the public opinion researcher, we may take some comfort in the fact that it is short-run conflict. In the long run, when elections are decided and controversies cooled, we can each search for facts with scholarly dispassion. Usually, we can be searching and dispassionate even in the short run. We-journalists and researchers-are, after all, bound by the two basic premises of any code of ethics: one ought to tell the truth, and one ought to keep one's promises. Situations arise, and the typical case of the leaked political poll is one, in which these two maxims are in conflict. The obvious way to avoid such a situation is to be careful about what you promise lest it keep you from telling the truth. Researchers have, in my experience, made promises to political clients which, if they did not require the researcher to lie, at least required him to stand mute and passively permit an untruth to go uncorrected. A candidate may commission polls in ten counties and then announce or leak the results for the two that show him ahead and suggest that these are typical of his entire state or district. Strictly interpreted, the new AAPOR disclosure rule requires the researcher to, set such a distortion straight. Or does it? If no one asks the incriminating question, does the researcher have an affirmative duty to supply the damaging answer? Even if the question is asked, might the researcher sidestep his duty with the justification that the disclosure rule requires clarification only of data already released and not of other data, however relevant to the interpretation of the first? If we reporters are inept at asking questions, researchers may be tempted to invoke such rationalizations. And sometimes we are inept. There have even been cases of reportorial ineptness preventing a researcher from correcting a political client's distortion. We are sometimes manipulated, and the politician is more adept at manipulation than the typical researcher. One thing the politician understands is that newsmen who cover politics usually follow one of two quite different operating modes. In one mode, the reporter-source relationship is one of some degree of mutual hostility and distrust. Both reporter and source recognize