Time to Shut Down Public Polling on Everything
Anyone who has read past entries on Media Critiques is aware that I dislike the current state of polling and the use of polling by the media. Polling experts claim that the numbers they produce on topics ranging from the latest fashions to the popularity of the president can be extrapolated to the entire population. This type of certainty demonstrates a failure by seemingly intelligent pollsters to recognize that polling is a corollary of marketing and not of academia.
The impetus for my latest rage about polling comes from an article in the Columbia Journalism Review discussing a Zogby poll that claims 52% of Americans would support an attack on Iran. Writer Michael Meyer points out a number of faults with the poll including the use of only two choices to respond to a hypothetical (yes, HYPOTHETICAL) completion of nuclear weapons by Iranians in the near future. Meyer fails to point out that Zogby may be the worst of the worst when it comes to polling due to the poor wording of poll questions. I shouldn’t push Zogby polls forward as the king of bad information as every polling company shares a similar stake in my contempt.
I am not only concerned with the appearance of political support for an Iranian war inherent within the Zogby poll. My concern spreads into the 2008 presidential election where it appears that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination without a problem. The ignorance of Washington elites of what real life Americans outside of polling groups feel about the political scene gives polling its power. Polls are a gauge of the perspectives of a few people that allow politicians and executives to proceed with their own initiatives with the thin veil of public support. Polls, like the Bible, can be interpreted in a number of ways. It is time to stop giving public opinion polls such a large role in our lives and show our support for an issue by picking up a phone, putting pen to paper and screaming out loud to people in the Washington echo chamber.
November 13th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
I, too, have always been incensed by the validity given polling results. Heck, I’ve worked in marketing and research for years, and I know that when it comes down to it, extrapolating a sampling of responses to the entire population is iffy at best. Not only that, the questions asked are definitely written to elicit a specific response. All the public ever sees, though, are snapshot results of percentage numbers, without really knowing the question, or realizing that the response of 52 out of 100 can hardly be reliably representative of millions of others.