Does political news coverage affect opinion polls? Well, it’s complicated…
Protestors lined up outside the Conservative party conference in autumn 2015 to hurl abuse, among other things, at delegates. And the media were just as likely to be on the receiving end as politicians. Channel 4’s Michael Crick, a journalist who’s no stranger to this sort of thing, later said he hadn’t witnessed such hostility towards the press since the 1980s.
No matter where they fall on the political spectrum, there are always some who believe the media is against them. When the left-wing Jeremy Corbyn loses the general election in 2020 it will be, according to his supporters, because the biased press didn’t give him a fair hearing. Meanwhile UKIP, a party of the right, likewise believes it is persecuted by a hostile media. Perhaps if every party feels hard done by, it might be a sign that journalism is doing its job.
This is an old debate unlikely to be settled soon. But it ignores an important question: does political coverage actually affect opinion polls? Well it depends, as it turns out, on how you look at it.
Over the Atlantic, Donald Trump has dominated the US presidential race for months. His every remark has been given miles of coverage by news organisations grateful for the web traffic he drives. Bernie Sanders, one of the democratic contenders, has complained that Trump is given too much airtime.
He may be on to something. Research published last month by Nieman Lab, an online journal for media wonks at Harvard University, found that the number of press mentions each presidential candidate received from October to December 2015 was directly correlated to their performance in opinion polls. But, it was found, the tone of the coverage – whether it was favourable or hostile – mattered significantly less than pure volume. Trump gets a rough ride in the media, yet continues to ride high in the polls.
The finding is, of course, heavily caveated. The relationship between polls, media and “everything else” is a complicated feedback loop where the flows of causality are difficult to determine. And I haven’t even mentioned the question of whether opinion polls are good predictors of actual election results. But still, the picture is striking: in press coverage, tone matters much less than volume.
What does this mean for British politics? Well the different media culture and voting system make it hard to draw parallels. But people here might still do well to bear in mind that the influence the press has over our democracy is a lot less clear cut than they might like to assume. Hostile coverage has been used by politicians down the ages to explain away their lack of electoral success without having to look at harder questions of what voters might actually want. Unfortunately, in 2016 that attitude doesn’t look like it’s going away.