TY - JOUR
T1 - For whom the poll airs comparing poll results to television poll coverage
AU - Searles, Kathleen
AU - Ginn, Martha Humphries
AU - Nickens, Jonathan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - Televised election coverage is increasingly dominated by the horse race, a key element of which is poll coverage. How do news outlets decide which poll to air? We know little about the gatekeeping function of news outlets as it pertains to poll coverage, perhaps because this research is plagued by selection bias: By observing only reported polls and not unre-ported polls, researchers cannot definitively establish that any differences in representativeness are due to bias. Using a novel dataset that includes all prime-time presidential election poll coverage on Fox, MSNBC, CNN, and broadcast television networks during the 2008 election, we compare the universe of polls released each day to the polls actually covered by each news network. We find differences between the distribution of poll coverage and distribution of actual poll results. Our results suggest that both gatekeepers and reporters may have a hand in this distortion.
AB - Televised election coverage is increasingly dominated by the horse race, a key element of which is poll coverage. How do news outlets decide which poll to air? We know little about the gatekeeping function of news outlets as it pertains to poll coverage, perhaps because this research is plagued by selection bias: By observing only reported polls and not unre-ported polls, researchers cannot definitively establish that any differences in representativeness are due to bias. Using a novel dataset that includes all prime-time presidential election poll coverage on Fox, MSNBC, CNN, and broadcast television networks during the 2008 election, we compare the universe of polls released each day to the polls actually covered by each news network. We find differences between the distribution of poll coverage and distribution of actual poll results. Our results suggest that both gatekeepers and reporters may have a hand in this distortion.
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U2 - 10.1093/poq/nfw031
DO - 10.1093/poq/nfw031
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85014407263
SN - 0033-362X
VL - 80
SP - 943
EP - 963
JO - Public Opinion Quarterly
JF - Public Opinion Quarterly
IS - 4
ER -