Put Yourself in a Reporter's Shoes

Until now, we've approached public opinion from the standpoint of the pollster -- that is, the individual whose role is to measure the public's attitudes and beliefs by designing, administering, and analyzing the results of public opinion polls. For Topic III, though, we're switching gears a bit to better appreciate the vantage point of another important actor in the politics of public opinion: the journalist, or the individual whose role is to disseminate pollsters' findings about what the public thinks about politics by reporting on it in the mass media.

Before getting into what "putting yourself in a reporter's shoes" will entail, it's worth thinking about why you should bother -- and, more generally, why it's worth spending a whole unit of a course on public opinion on the role of the media. Way back at the start of the course, I suggested (though perhaps not in so many words) that it is important for students of American politics to have an appreciation of public opinion because of its pivotal role in a political system whose form of government is a "republican democracy" -- that is, a political system in which sovereignty rests ultimately with the people but the various tasks of government are carried out by elected representatives acting on their behalf. In order for that to work, there has to be some means of two-way communication between the people and the government: The people need to know what their representatives in government are up to so that they might hold them accountable, and government officials need to know what their constituents think and want (i.e. public opinion) in order to govern according to the will of the people. That's where the media come in -- they are the primary means through which political communication takes place.

When it comes to modern public opinion polling, the media play an important role in conveying pollsters' findings to both public officials and the public at large. This isn't a straightforward translation process, though. Practically whenever communication takes place through a middleman (in this case, the reporter who takes information provided by a polling organization and then presents it to his media outlet's audience of public officials and citizens), the content of the commuication gets altered in some way: Some information may get lost along the way or reframed in a way that wasn't intended by its source. Nor is this necessarily a result of "media bias" (although that certainly does exist) or journalists' efforts to skew information for their own gain: Even the best-intentioned reporters face professional constraints that required them to make tough decisions about how to balance their objective of faithful and comprehensive reporting with tight deadlines, word limits, and the need to attract and maintain an audience for their product.

The purpose of this unit of the course is to give you a hands-on sense of how reporters manage that balancing act. To that end, you'll complete part of a course designed for journalists-in-training and journalism professionals at the online News University. You should also read the supplementary required text, "20 Questions a Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results," from the National Council on Public Polls. Then, you'll have an opportunity to put the information you've gleaned from these resource into practice, first by critiquing the Pantagraph's report on a recent local poll and then by producing your own 350-word article on a recent national survey about religion in the United States.