October 12, 2004, 11.04pm • 18 comments » • 1,941 Views

News polls distorted by campaign

MSNBC showed itself again to be ahead of the curve in producing innovative interacting news for the first US presidential debate recently. I watched the debate the morning after on the network’s site; I was able to choose which questions-and-answers I wanted to watch (rather than watch the whole thing) and vote on who I thought performed best in answering each question.

As I was interested in how the American public had interpreted the debate and who it thought was the victor, I thought this was an especially snazzy feature. Until I saw how, in the results for each vote, Kerry was deemed the winner by MSNBC readers, by miles. Someone’s gamed this system, I thought.

Today, Steve Yelvington reprises online news polls’ importance in the US presidential race, pointing out a report on how the Democrats have undertaken a concerted effort to vote Kerry in news polls across the web.

Of course, the parties have major-league media and supporter mobilisation strategies - and the Democrats seem to be intent on not missing out this time around so are fighting fire.

But this is sad. Not only does it corrupt news organisation’s good will and distort their content, it paints a poor picture of democracy. Would the parties ever attempt to fix a traditional Mori poll in the same way?

Yelvington offers the reminder that publishers should always say their polls should not necessarily be taken as an accurate measure of opinion.