Frank Bruni has it right.
The New York Times columnist has declared that the American media are addicted to polls. They can’t report on them enough. The issues driving the Democratic and Republican presidential primary campaigns? Who needs ’em!
We need to write about polls.
Broadcast outlets lead with them. Print media report on them constantly.
Bruni noted that during the Christmas-to-New Year break, Iowa voters were polled 11 times about their presidential preferences. The media reported on those polls dutifully.
The most hilarious element of all this is how media types keep bemoaning the fact that the media cover these campaigns like “horse races.”
I’ll admit that I am one of those who become fixated occasionally by polls.
Some of them are quite ridiculous, actually. National polls showing voter preferences between party primary candidates present one example. I’ve noted in this blog before how meaningless those polls are, given that the candidates — say, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — won’t face each other nationally; they are running state by state.
But hey, let’s poll voters nationally anyway.
Perhaps we can lay some of the blame for this fixation on Donald J. Trump, the leading GOP candidate for president. He loves polls. They’re huuuuge, as he says often . . . especially when they place him in the lead. Polls that place him behind someone else? Meaningless. They don’t count. Who cares about ’em?
Bruni notes in his essay, though, that Trump often starts his stump speeches off with results from the latest polls.
The media then report it.
I hope to hear it from a major newspaper newsroom or a broadcast/cable TV studio: Stop us before we report on polls again!
