The Monday Morning Media Memo
There is a science to sampling public opinion and extrapolating how a larger population feels about a particular issue. George Gallup made a career of telling people what the public thought. But the arrival of the Internet has created a cottage industry of polling, and Television News has jumped in with both feet. Many stations in Alabama and elsewhere use "web polls" as part of their news programming.
There is a science to sampling public opinion and extrapolating how a larger population feels about a particular issue. George Gallup made a career of telling people what the public thought. But the arrival of the Internet has created a cottage industry of polling, and Television News has jumped in with both feet. Many stations in Alabama and elsewhere use "web polls" as part of their news programming.
Anchor: Tell us who you think will win the Primary!
Co-Anchor: Go to WWTV-dot-com and vote in our web poll! We'll tell you the results tonight at six!
Some allow multiple votes from the same person, and all are subject to manipulation by special-interests who can rally folks via e-mail to "bomb" the poll.
Because the poll is self-selected...viewers decide to take part or not...and because the sample size may be small...web polls have no real meaning. And if they have no real meaning, why are stations reporting them?
Networks aren't immune. CNN calls theirs "A CNN Quick Vote", but all of the nets use them in one for or another.
In addition to being unscientific, take note how frequently stations will report results with only the percentages..i.e., "60-per cent of our viewers say..". Since it's not a random sample of your viewers, you can not extrapolate the results to all of your viewers. And how about telling us exactly how many people "voted" anyway. If it was just 100, than 60-people are being given the credibility of the general public that is sampled in a true poll.
Newspapers sometimes team up with stations to share of the considerable cost of true polling, by groups like the Mason-Dixon Poll, or Gallup, or Southern Opinion Research or Capital Survey Research, the AEA Polling arm. Internet Polls cost stations virtually nothing, and are worth virtually nothing.
My favorite station web poll was the one in Pennsylvania that asked its viewers if they had stopped believing the (professional, national) Presidential Polls.
If broadcasters are going to regain any of the credibility they've lost in recent years (the subject of an upcoming MMMM), eliminating the fraudulent web polls would be a quick way to start.
[Next Monday on The MMMM: an EXCLUSIVE!!!. ]
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