The Polls as a News Event in the 1980 Presidential Campaign

Abstract

Public opinion polls made up 15 percent of the news events covered during the 1980 presidential election campaign, but news stories generated by polls were no more likely to receive better play in the 50 newspapers studied than other stories about the campaign. Horserace polls were popular with editors during the last two weeks of the campaign. James Glen Stovall is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Director of the Communication Research and Service Center at the University of Alabama. Jacqueline H. Solomon is a graduate student in journalism at the University of Alabama. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 48:615-623 ? 1984 by the Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier Science Publishing Co., Inc. 0033-362X/84/0048-615/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.45 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 05:27:29 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 616 JAMES GLEN STOVALL AND JACQUELINE H. SOLOMON Still other critics have decried the increasing tendency of news organizations to commission their own polls. Whereas polls were once the preserve of private firms that sold their results to the news media or other interested parties, now news organizations themselves are commissioning public opinion polls in order to have exclusive rights in reporting their results. Defenders of this practice say that such polls give the news organization added insight into the results and more assurance that the polls are conducted legitimately. Critics point out that news organizations are laying themselves open to the charge of creating news, overplaying their own poll results while underplaying others, and unduly intruding into the political process. Cockburn and Ridgeway (1981:96) suggest some darker motives on the part of these news organizations, calling media-sponsored polls pure media events designed to sustain interest in the 12-month body watch known as a presidential election. While coverage of elections, particularly presidential election campaigns, has been a source of much scholarly activity, few of those students have focused on the public opinion poll as a news story in itself. Broh (1980) analyzed 65 New York Times articles, 57 national news stories, and 8 national newsmagazine stories about polls during the 1976 presidential campaign and found a strong tendency for journalists to emphasize the horserace and forecasting elements of polls. Using poll results for issue analysis was not something that appealed to journalists. Beyond examinations such as Broh's, we know little about the dynamics of the public opinion poll as a news event during the political campaign. How much news does a poll generate? Does news about polls dominate election campaign coverage? How strong is the tendency for journalists to emphasize the horserace and forecasting aspects of polls? Will editors choose poll stories over other stories about the campaign? Will they play poll stories more prominently? This study on the poll as a news event during the 1980 presidential campaign seeks to shed some light on these questions.