POLLING AND T H E NEWS MEDIA

ALBERT E. GOLLIN

The half-century during which Public Opinion Quarterly has been pub-
lished has witnessed eruptions and deep changes in the American polit-
ical and social landscape. In many cases, the forces shaping these
changes (e.g., the end of isolationism, growing racial tolerance, height-
ened concern for the environment) have been registered and tracked,
more or less faithfully, by public polls. The opinion polling enterprise
itself has undergone significant changes in this period, growing from
the isolated efforts of a handful of polling firms to its current status as a
constitutive element of many nations in our Information Age.
A number of stock-taking appraisals of polling in relation to aspects
of the public opinion process have appeared in recent years (e.g.,
Gollin, 1980; Martin, 1984; Marsh, 1984). The goal of this essay is to
highlight a few changes in the status of polling, with special reference
to the role of the news media, to complement and extend the analysis
of other changes in public opinion research in this anniversary issue.
In its first year of publication (1937), the four issues of POQ con-
tained practically no poll data. The 1936 Literary Digest debacle was
the stimulus for articles on straw polls by Arch Crossley and Claude
Robinson, who referred to a few political preference results. But the
quantitative study of public opinion was still more an aspiration than a
reality. However, "issue polls" were becoming a more prominent ele-
ment of the work of the American Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup)
and the Fortune Quarterly Survey (Roper), as Robinson (1937) noted in
a trenchant essay on criticisms of political polls.
Compare this 1937 sampling of writings on public opinion with the
contents of any recent volume of POQ: the triumph of the quantitative
is virtually complete. Moreover, this change in mode of discourse has
won general acceptance among specialists and the public alike. The
concept of public opinion has (largely due to polling) become cotermi-
nous with the results of public polls, however partial, misleading, or
inconclusive they are as indicators.
This is the first, most obvious change in the status of polling, as

ALBERT E. GOLLIN is Vice-President and Associate Director of Research at the Newspa-

per Advertising Bureau. H e served as AAPOR's Secretary-Treasurer in 1981-82, and as
its President in 1984-85.
Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 51.S86-S94 O 1987 by the Amencan Association for Publlc Opin~onResearch
Published by The University of Ch~cagoPress 10033-362W8710051-04(2)1$2.50
Polling and the News Media S87

reflected in the pages of POQ and elsewhere. Nowadays, poll and

survey data on matters of public interest are voluminous, timely, and
ubiquitous-all of which has lent them added force. A related change is
the steady growth in the number of polling agencies or sources that
account for this embarrassment of riches. And although one constant
since 1937 has been the leading position played by the news media in
sponsoring and publicizing the results of polls, here, too, changes have
occurred that deserve consideration in weighing the current status of
polling.

The Mass Media Encounter Polls

At the dawn of the era of polls, the mass media-newspapers and
certain magazines-paid to gain access to the polling operations and
results of a few leading commercial pollsters. The Gallup Poll's syn-
dicated columns (printed in more than 200 newspapers by the 1950s)
were for several decades a primary source of poll data injected into the
public domain. Mass-circulation magazines periodically made polls the
centerpiece of articles on various topics in the 1930s and subsequently.
Roper, Crossley, Harris, Yankelovich and other eponymous polls also
gained recognition as their work entered the public domain via the
media. State polls gathered and made available additional public opin-
ion data to the readers of their sponsoring daily newspapers. And
academic social scientists began to gain access to resources that en-
abled them to extend their work on attitudes by means of surveys of
representative public samples (Cantril, 1944; Converse, 1987).
Slowly, a new public information and feedback system was being
instituted, gradually supplementing or supplanting the individual and
collective indicators of popular sentiments and the legislative actions
that had previously been accepted as valid manifestations of public
opinion. The press, finding polls to be a highly useful means of supple-
menting their coverage of numerous topics, began to support polling as
an integral feature of their news operations, instead of buying access to
syndicated polling data or sponsoring special polls. Thus, the press-
the vital "organ" (shaper and mirror) of public opinion in standard
treatments of the topic-became inevitably a leading actor in the
evolving polling enterprise.
This process was more discontinuous than the foregoing might sug-
gest. Polling by the press prior to the 1960s was episodic, compared
with its use of pollsters' services. But the growing use of polls by
political candidates and special interest groups strengthened the inter-
est on the part of leading newspapers, an interest that may also have
been whetted by their growing sense of competition with TV news
S88 Albert E. Gollin

operations, especially in election coverage (Mendelsohn and Crespi,

1970). The volume of poll results appearing in the press continued to
expand, a reflection not only of greater availability and the press's
weakness for handouts ("free" news) but also of the steady gain in
respect for polls among key figures in the press's environment (govern-
ment and business in particular), which lent greater prestige to polling.
By the 1970s, therefore, a variety of influences flowed together to
swell the demand for polling within the news media, "pulled" by the
demonstrated value of polls for political coverage in particular. The
economics of polling encouraged a sharing of costs, giving rise to the
joint polling operations of CBS News and The New York Times, The
Washington Post and ABC News, and other media couples. Usually
these involved a marriage of a print and a broadcast medium. At times,
one or more newspapers within a state joined forces with a TV station
or with one another to cover an election or conduct a community poll.
If the news value of polls was the main cause of the growth of the
media polling enterprise, some social trends and technological im-
provements greatly facilitated the process. A recent assessment of
survey research identified these generally influential factors: "In-
creased literacy and numeracy . . . almost universal access to the
telephone . . . and increased power and decreased costs of automated
information processing" (Turner and Martin, 1984, 1:29).
Of these, the switch from face-to-face to telephone interviewing in
the field of opinion research was arguably the most consequential. It
broke down a number of barriers to the spread of news polling. News-
papers had telephone banks in their classified advertising or circulation
offices that could be used to keep polling costs down. Random digit
dialing and WATS line service further facilitated the efficient conduct
of national or wide-area surveys. The advent of computerized data
analysis and of CAT1 systems telescoped interviewing and data pro-
cessing stages, and sped up the entire polling process. As a result, the
turnaround time of a poll has shrunk from weeks (or months) in the
1930s to hours in the 1980s.
A good indicator of the overall trend in news media polling, particu-
larly as the media involved have long been models for emulation, can
be seen in Table 1. Since 1975 the CBS News and New York Times
polls, jointly and separately conducted, have expanded steadily in
number and reach. (In recent years, they have undertaken independent
or cooperative polls in Grenada, Mexico, and Japan.) Moreover, the
sheer number of polls is an imperfect indicator of their news value.
Typically, a single poll will yield multiple news stories or feature arti-
cles. The data also document the allure of state-level exit polls as a
species of election polls-for a broadcast news service because they
yield timely results for use in election-night coverage, and for a daily
Polling and the News Media S89

Table I. CBS News & New York Times Polls: 1975-1986

Jointly Conducted CBS News Only NY Times Only

National Other Exit National Other Exit National Other Exit Total

NOTE:NY Times summary excludes special-group surveys (e.g., athletes, conven-

tion delegates, MBAs).
SOURCES: Marjorie Connelly, NY Times News Surveys; Keating Holland, CBS
News Surveys.
" One with the Los Angeles Times.
One was in Grenada.
Two were cross-national surveys; one was in Japan and U.S.
One was cross-national; one was in Mexico.

paper because they offer rich analytical possibilities for next-day in-
depth coverage. It should be noted that CBS News pioneered in exit
polling (Mitofsky, 1986).

News Polls: Strengths, Problems, Risks

If social changes and technological progress combined to make actual
what was merely feasible, in diffusing the use and quickening the pace
of polling, certain benefits and problems of news polls soon became
evident. One was the suspicion on the part of politicians, candidates,
and political activists that the news media were thrusting themselves
forward and using polls to alter the public agenda in one way or an-
other-"making news" rather than reporting it. Then too, conflicts
arose whenever advocates claimed that public opinion supported some
policy or position only to have a news poll controvert the claim. And
other accusations of improperly influencing the political process were
made, especially during preelection periods, when candidates were
S90 Albert E. Gollin

soliciting support by making claims about electibility, only to have

their assertions (sometimes based on a secret poll) rudely blunted by a
press poll.
One of the more sobering criticisms of media election polling was
directed to exit polls. In this case, it was claimed that the outcomes of
elections had been altered by the fact that summary judgments about
candidates were being made available to prospective voters while the
voting places were still open. The presumed effect was greater upon
races in the western time zones, once the TV networks' election-night
coverage had begun (Sudman, 1986). But in time, as local TV stations
increasingly began to conduct exit polls and project or "characterize"
local election outcomes, the complaints became more general. By 1984
the controversy had become sufficiently heated that AAPOR devoted a
plenary session to an examination of the issues (Milavsky et al., 1985).
Another problem accentuated by the proliferations of polls was the
quality of the polling effort. Over time, given the stepped-up volume of
local political polling by diverse organizations, a falloff in quality could
be expected. As Crespi (1986) has shown in a recent study, this expec-
tation appears to have been justified. He examined preelection polls
that dealt with 446 state and local races (both primary and general
elections) and found an appreciable difference in quality in polls car-
ried out by independent pollsters vs. media ones, and (linked with this
distinction) in polls done by interviewers in full-service polling firms
vs. pickup interviewers hired by the media. In both cases, the former
achieved greater accuracy.
These polling context factors added to the explanatory value of
higher (vs. lower) turnout elections, general (vs. primary) elections,
and closeness to election day in accounting for variations in the accu-
racy achieved by local polls. As Witt (1987) has shown, the record of
state-level polls in 1986, compiled by a growing number of independent
pollsters and news media, continued to be dogged by conflicting results
and misleading forecasts.
Thus, it is clear that poll proliferation carries costs as well as
benefits, seen from a variety of standpoints. While many established
pollsters and larger media polling agencies have shown organizational
learning in their polling efforts, many "newcomers" (especially local
media polls) are compiling records that reflect no great credit upon
them. Moreover, inconsistent or contradictory results are the inevita-
ble by-products of a proliferation of issue polls, and preelection polls
often miss out on the dynamics or misstate the closeness of contests.
The risk that is posed by such a blemished record, as has long been
pointed out, is a devaluation of polling and survey research-not only
in the estimation of strategic groups of sponsors and users but also
among the general public upon whose willingness to cooperate (by
Polling and the News Media S9 1

sharing their views with strangers) the entire polling enterprise is ulti-
mately dependent. For the news media whose polls prove to be mis-
leading or errant as guides to the state of public opinion, the risk
assumes another shape: a loss of public trust or credibility as news
sources.

Regulating Polls and Educating the News Media

What are the counterweights to these threats to polling quality, which ap-
pear to be correlated with easy entry into the field by poorly trained or
inexperienced people, the expanding volume of polling activities, and
the growing appetite for polls as a news-gathering tool? Legal regula-
tion, as a means of fostering professionalism and protecting the public,
has always been one of the options. Were it to be successful in pre-
scribing credentials for entry into the field and standards of acceptable
practice, presumably both the quality of polling and of its practitioners
could be controlled. And regulatory gestures have been made ever
since the earliest years of polling as an infant industry. A bill was
introduced in Congress in 1936 to regulate straw polls (Robinson,
1937). A decade later, in the wake of the disastrous experience in the
1948 elections, Gallup noted, "The question of government regulation
of polls has come up in nearly every Congress during the last 20 years
and is certain to be raised again in the eighty-first Congress" (Gallup,
1948:733). The current wave of attempts to regulate telemarketing
practices is only the most recent assertion of a state prerogative with
respect to certain types of encounters with the public, which could
have a potential spillover effect on public polling.
But in fact, as the pioneers of polling recognized, legal regulation has
been a fairly remote possibility given the First Amendment's protec-
tions. The path of self-regulation was the preferred alternative, and it
was pursued fitfully through the promulgation of norms and standards
of professional conduct. It was hoped that these would exert peer
pressure on active pollsters and socialize later entrants into the field.
One strand of this effort-the specification of minimal disclosure stan-
dards to be adhered to by public reporting agencies (i.e., pollsters and
the news media)-was meant to serve a mixed educational and control
function, by making the press and the public, over time, increasingly
aware of the scientific and craft elements that go into the proper con-
duct of public opinion research (Roper, 1983), thus encouraging them
to become more critical and demanding as sponsors or consumers of
poll results.
The history of efforts made by AAPOR and other professional asso-
ciations amply confirms the difficulty of devising clearcut standards
S92 Albert E. Collin

applicable to all of the conditions under which polling is undertaken.

Even the guidelines for minimal disclosure of polling methods, while
less contentious as an issue than were (and are) performance or pro-
cedural standards, failed to win the assent of AAPOR members for
almost 20 years after their initial proposal in 1947. And it wasn't until
1986 that these guidelines-formulated initially to assist polling firms
and news media disseminators of poll results-were revised and made
an integral part of AAPOR's Code of Professional Ethics and Practices,
binding upon AAPOR members as individuals (Gollin, 1988).
In 1968 the National Council on Public Polls began to promote addi-
tional efforts at self-regulation as well as media education, initially
under the leadership of George Gallup and Arch Crossley, two veter-
ans in the quest to elevate and reinforce polling standards. NCPP
focused its attention on the news media, organizing special seminars
and symposia on polling methods and applications prior to and after
major elections (Cantril, 1980). In time, these ad hoc activities were
supplemented by formal training sessions for journalists at university
centers (e.g., Michigan, Connecticut) and by programs of press associ-
ations in recognition of the special editorial responsibilities that they
assumed as polling agencies or users of poll data (Wilhoit and Weaver,
1980; Gollin, 1983). But it remains doubtful that improvements in the
average level of quality in the conduct and reporting of polls have kept
pace with the rate of diffusion of polling across the news media.
In sum, the past 50 years have registered great progress in polling
methods and practices and a concomitant growth in press and public
awareness of the value of poll results as measures of public opinions
and beliefs. But there remains a "clash of institutional imperatives"
(Ladd, 1980) between the goals of surveys done for newsmaking pur-
poses and those guided by academic, public policy, or other interests.
As elements of the polling enterprise they have contributed signifi-
cantly to the quantitative representation of public opinion that has
gained both currency and acceptance around the world. Yet, paradoxi-
cally, the very success they have achieved has helped create condi-
tions that could, if left unchecked, lead to their gradual decline.
Poll-wariness and resistance to surveys appear to be growing (Kohut
et al., 1986; Milavsky, 1987). Much of this is the result of the explosive
growth in the use of the telephone for sales promotion, and the steady
expansion of commercial and governmental research activities. By
comparison, news polling could be seen as more acceptable because it
informs or diverts a public whose views are gathered, refracted, and
fed back to them by the media. But whatever contributes to a with-
drawal of public. cooperation or to the degradation of polling quality
can ultimately threaten the entire polling enterprise, and as we have
seen, the news media have not been blameless in this regard. The
Polling and the News Media S93

struggle to elevate and reinforce professional standards in opinion re-

search is therefore likely to be as fateful for the status of public opinion
research, including news polling, in the next 50 years as it has in the
preceding ones.

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