Posted on 03/30/2016 9:07:23 AM PDT by Academiadotorg
When academics point out the problems with polls, they might wind up trying to regulate them. "Because one of the things I want to say about public opinion polls is that they are the child of a very bad marriage between academics and journalists," Jill Lepore, a staff writer for the New Yorker, said in an appearance at Harvard last year.
Lepore also teaches at Harvard. "When modern public opinion polling began in the 1930s, the response rate—which is the percentage of people who answer a survey, of those who are asked—the response rate in the 1930s was well above 90," Lepore said in remarks at the Kennedy School at Harvard. "By the 1980s, that rate had fallen to 60."
"And pollsters began to panic, because they believed it was going to be impossible to continue their work if the rate fell below 30. It has since sunk to the single digits. A not uncommon response rate for an American public opinion poll is three."
Perhaps not too surprisingly, she finds the results of polls distressing. "Turning the press into pollsters has made American political culture Trumpian: frantic, volatile, shortsighted, sales driven, and antidemocratic," she said.
Her solution? "And while you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, there are a great many things that we are comfortable, as a political community, regulating, to improve the nature of our deliberative democracy," she said at Harvard. "And one of them, I think, ought to be this industry."
I agree with her diagnosis, it’s her prescription that is insane. I don’t know how you could regulate this without violating freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
The question is now to make polls less accessible to those that know how to abuse them.
The answer is not regulation. The answer is education of the electorate to understand that polls are invalid on their face and are used mainly for propaganda, in other words think for yourself and don’t let the media scum persuade you with bullsh*t.
More problematic is the pretending that journalists and academics have distinct or dispassionate political view points.
That is absurd and that is what is driving the refusal to answer questions.
Journalists and Academics want Democrats to win and republicans to lose.
Moreover they both really like socialism and despise conservatism.
These assumptions matter.
they do, particularly in the crafting of the questions: Would you support higher taxes to fight terrorism?
exactly
There's big bucks to be made and influence to be peddled through polling agencies these days. Unfortunately, very few of them abide by the scientific and statistical rules, so results are varied and questionable.
Natch, the “solution” is to make it a crime to not answer a poller. These academics need to be stamped out. Virtually all the evil philosophies that have made earth a hell for the last 150 years have come out of universities. Marxism, Kensianism, Nihilism, Eugenics, Global Warmism.... the list is endless. All conceived of by academic eggheads in Ivory Towers. All of whom never ever experienced in real life the subjects they were oh so expert on. The fascist in thos article is more of the same.
As Mencken said, we have an intelligentsia that is not intelligent.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.