Experts suggests that the media is one of the root causes of the issues of political polling.
Video by: Abigail Hughes
Multimedia by: Marco Sasso
By: Justin Lam
Though political polling was widely criticized in the 2020 election, these estimates weren’t actually that far off from the final results according to experts. The media’s focus on polls may be the real issue highlighted in the most recent presidential race.
Matt Lebo, political science department chair at Western University, said that mail-in ballots and close races in battleground states made the election seem more contested than it actually was.
“The difficulty is that the election is one not at the national level, but at the state level,” said Dennis Pilon, an associate professor in the Department of Politics at York University. “Because of the electoral college votes, at the state level, the results were much closer in the swing ridings.”
However, media outlets tend to employ “horse race” reporting. They tend to only focus on the frontrunners and underdogs,covering elections like a sport rather than informing the public on policy issues.
Eric Merkley, a political scientist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, said this coverage is a “chicken or the egg” problem – reporters produce poll stories, consumers find it intriguing and thus it garners views, so more stories of the sort are produced.
“People need to be informed of the positions of the parties on any number of issues, there are very important issues,” Merkley said.
When covering stories about elections, David McKie, an adjunct professor at Carleton University and King’s College and contract lecturer at Ryerson University who teaches journalism, tells his students to listen to citizens.
“We have to find a way to empower citizens through our reporting and give them a voice,” McKie said. “Either a direct pipeline to the policy makers so that they can ask their questions unfiltered or a voice to air their concerns.”
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