Nice find. The Democratic whining is mostly an attempt to strike at the legitimacy of Bush's victory. They had some success in 2000 with this issue. It won't work this time.
I hope that the exit poll report referenced below gets released. I have never trusted exit polls.
yahoo.com
Exit pollsters to release election report to media
Tue Jan 18, 9:25 AM ET
By Mark Memmott, USA TODAY
This week, the firms that produced exit polls of voters last November will tell the news organizations that paid them what, if anything, they think went wrong.
The surveys of voters as they left polling places led to widespread speculation on Election Day that Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites) was sweeping President Bush (news - web sites) out of office. But whether voters will ever know what happened remains unclear.
Edie Emery, a spokeswoman for the six-member media consortium that paid for the exit polls, says representatives from ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, NBC and the Associated Press want to review the report before making any decisions about what to make public.
The behind-closed-doors delivery of the report could come as soon as today. Because the report's conclusions might not be made public, the report is unlikely to appease critics who say the six media companies have moved too slowly to release information collected in the exit polls and have said too little about possible problems with those surveys.
"It's amazing to me that there's even a possibility that the report won't be released to the public," says Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "There was a major national controversy involving the integrity of the news organizations and of the polling firms involved."
Any dissatisfaction with the handling of this week's report would add one more complaint to a growing list of grievances some journalism experts have about the way the news media report about polls. They say that last year, as during every presidential election for at least the past four decades, the media were too obsessed with meaningless changes in polls.
Frustrated by what they see as chronically lousy reporting, journalism schools and polling organizations want to train reporters and editors to be more sophisticated users of polling data.
"Too many journalists don't know a good poll from a bad poll" or how to properly interpret them, says Cliff Zukin, professor of public policy at New Jersey's Rutgers University and vice president of the 1,600-member American Association for Public Opinion Research.
Mistakes in recent years
In each national election since 1992, the major television networks and AP have jointly paid for exit polls. In 2000, problems with the system contributed to mistakes that television networks made on election night - declaring Al Gore (news - web sites) the winner in Florida, then giving the state to Bush, then deciding that the state and election were too close to call. In 2002, a computer meltdown left the media with no exit poll data for national races.
Last November's exit polls quickly came under fire. On Election Day, the material was supposed to be shared only with the six news groups and other media (including USA TODAY) who paid to see at least some of the data and hoped it would help guide their coverage. But much of it leaked out starting in early afternoon.
The leaked data subtly influenced pundits and commentators on television, who dropped hints that Kerry was ahead of Bush. It wasn't until after midnight on the East Coast when exit poll data caught up to the fact that Bush would be re-elected.
Warren Mitofsky and Joseph Lenski, two experienced pollsters hired before last year's election to overhaul and run the exit poll system, have been reviewing whether their early work on Election Day was flawed. They and the six media companies have said almost nothing about that review.
Mitofsky, in a rare public comment two weeks after the election, said early results may have been skewed by problems some of his survey takers had getting close enough to polling places. He has also said the exit poll data were "raw."
The news groups defend their actions. Their position: Since they paid for the information to be gathered from voters, they can handle the data and questions about them as they see fit. They plan, Emery says, to follow past practice. That means information gathered by the exit pollsters - showing, for example, breakdowns in support for Bush and Kerry by age, gender and race - will soon be made public.
But Mitosky's and Lenski's conclusions about whether there were mistakes made in the exit polling operation may not be released.
Among the reasons why there's intense interest in what Mitofsky and Lenski concluded: Some organizations, including Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, have been clamoring for further investigations into allegations of voting irregularities in Ohio and some other states. Last month, Rep. John Conyers (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich., sent a letter to networks requesting the "raw data" from Ohio exit polls, which he says might be of use in such inquiries - if the data are reliable.
Zukin says the media companies and their pollsters need to open up. "It's hard to judge whether they're being too slow," he says. "But I do know they've been too quiet."
Zukin's association doesn't plan to be quiet this year about what it sees as another weak performance by the news media on poll reporting. It will distribute training materials for midcareer journalists and have its members spread the word at conferences and in newsrooms where they're invited. The organization will spend about $50,000 on the effort.
Journalists agree work needed
At journalism schools, "we're behind the curve. We should have been doing more about this 10 or 20 years ago," says Stephen Lacy, journalism professor at Michigan State University. Increasingly under discussion at Michigan State and other undergraduate journalism schools: courses in statistics and polling designed for journalists.
The reason to care about poll reporting: If the media don't accurately report what polls are saying about who's ahead, who's behind and what issues matter most, politicians may take the nation down paths voters don't want to travel.
Those who say the news media should do better don't get many arguments from working journalists.
"We all really need, in news organizations, to do more work on this," says Gary Langer, director of polling at ABC News. "We need to be informed consumers, skeptical consumers and careful consumers and users of the data."
Too many stories, says Michael Barone, a contributor to Fox News Channel and a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report, fail to make clear that polls are "not really even good snapshots sometimes. They're more like impressionistic paintings."
One phrase says a lot about the shortcomings of the news media's poll reporting: "The margin of error is +/-" a certain number of percentage points. In some stories, the phrase is "margin of sampling error." It's safe to say few readers, viewers or even reporters can explain what that means.
On a poll showing Bush ahead of Kerry, 52%-48%, a 3-percentage-point margin of error would mean Bush might have been leading Kerry by as much as 55%-45% or might have been trailing Kerry by as much as 51%-49%.
Other rarely explained factors that can affect results include the order of the questions and the techniques used to divide a sample into groups such as "registered" and "likely" voters.
"You fight for every inch in the newspaper to explain those kinds of things," says Susan Pinkus, polling director at the Los Angeles Times. "But ... it's tough." |
