Reporting Public Opinion How the Media Turns Boring Polls into Biased News

This book is about how opinion polls are reported in the media. Opinions polls are not reported in the media as unfiltered numbers, and some opinion polls are not reported at all. This volume demonstrates how opinion polls travel through several stages that eventually turn boring numbers into biased news in the media. The framework offered in this book helps to understand how some polls end up in the news coverage, and which systemic biases abound in the news media reports of opinion polls. In the end, a change narrative will be prominent in the reporting of opinion polls which contributes to what the general public sees and shares. The findings cover journalists, politicians, experts and the public, and how they all share a strong preference for change. 

1. Bringing public opinion to the public: from polls to media coverage.- 2. The four steps of poll coverage: creating, selecting, reporting, and responding.- 3. Explaining how media outlets select opinion polls: the role of change.- 4. Characteristics of opinion poll reporting: creating the change narrative.- 5. Reactions and implications: how do the elite and the public respond to polls?.- 6. Alternatives to opinion polls: no polls, vox pop, poll aggregators and social media.- 7. Conclusion: How the media could report opinion polls.

Erik Gahner Larsen is Senior Scientific Adviser at the Conflict Analysis Research Centre, University of Kent, UK. He has conducted multiple research projects on the coverage of opinion polls in the media, and his research has been published in journals such as the British Journal of Political Science and The International Journal of Press/Politics.

Zoltán Fazekas is Associate Professor of Business and Politics, with focus on quantitative methods in the Department of International Economics, Government and Business at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His research is at the intersection of electoral behavior, psychology, and communication; it has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Political Communication, and the Journal of Communication, among others.