A follow-up to yesterday’s post about news media, pollsters and politics.
These are excerpts from an article by William Fox published in today’s Globe & Mail :
Mr. Dion, like many party leaders before him, is hostage to a campaign practice known as horse-race coverage.
Mr. Dion's bigger challenge in getting his message out is the polls, or more precisely media reporting of public-opinion surveys and our collective response to them.
Media analysis of public-opinion research in the campaign context of who is winning, who is losing, and how much time is left in the game has been a standard feature of political coverage since the 1940s. What has changed is the viral growth of these polls and the news stories they generate.
Poll reporting in campaigns was once a weekly phenomenon. With new media technologies, we report our reactions in real time. Mr. Dion is caught in this vortex of poll-driven expectations.
William Fox is the author of "Spin War".
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