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On January 8, 2008, the date of the New Hampshire primary, media pollsters made their biggest prediction gaffe since dubbing Thomas Dewey a shoo-in to beat incumbent president Harry S. Truman. Eleven different polls forecast a solid win by Barack Obama; instead, Hillary Clinton took New Hampshire and recharged her candidacy. The months that followed only brought more dismal performances and contradictory results--undeniable evidence that something is terribly wrong with the polling industry today. It's easy to spot the election polls that get it wrong. Equally misleading and often far more disastrous are polls misrepresenting public opinion on government policy. For instance, in the period leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, every major media poll showed substantial public support for a preemptive strike. In truth, there was no majority of Americans calling for war. For the first time, David W. Moore--praised as a "scholarly crusader" by the New York Times--reveals that pollsters don't report public opinion, they manufacture it. And they do so at the peril of our democratic process. While critics cry foul over partisan favoritism in the mainstream media, what's really at work is a power bias that polls legitimate by providing the stamp of public approval. Drawing on over a decade's experience at the Gallup Poll and a distinguished academic career in survey research, Moore describes the questionable tactics pollsters use to create poll-driven news stories--including force-feeding respondents, slanting question wording, and ignoring public ignorance on even the most arcane issues. More than proof that the numbers do lie,The Opinion Makersclearly and convincingly spells out how urgent it is that we make polls deliver on their promise to monitor, not manipulate, the pulse of democracy.
From the opening decades of the republic when political parties sponsored newspapers to current governmental practices that actively subsidize the collection and dissemination of the news, the press and the government have been far from independent. Unlike those earlier days, however, the news is no longer produced by a diverse range of individual outlets but is instead the result of a collective institution that exercises collective power. In explaining how the news media of today operate as an intermediary political institution, akin to the party system and interest group system, Cook demonstrates how the differing media strategies used by governmental agencies and branches respond to the constitutional and structural weaknesses inherent in a separation-of-powers system. Cook examines the news media's capacity to perform the political tasks that they have inherited and points the way to a debate on policy solutions in order to hold the news media accountable without treading upon the freedom of the press.
It is often assumed that think tanks carry enormous weight with lawmakers. In Do Think Tanks Matter? Donald Abelson argues that the basic question of how think tanks have evolved and under what conditions they can and do have an effect is consistently ignored. Think tank directors often credit their institutes with influencing major policy debates and government legislation and many journalists and scholars believe the explosion of think tanks in the latter part of the twentieth century indicates their growing importance in the policy-making process. Abelson goes beyond assumptions, identifying the influence and relevance of public policy institutes in today's political arena in the United States, where they've become an integral feature of the political landscape, and in Canada, where, despite recent growth in numbers, they enjoy less prominence than their US counterparts. By focusing on the policy cycle, issue articulation, policy formation, and implementation, Abelson argues that individual think tanks have sometimes played an important role in shaping the political dialogue and the policy preferences and choices of decision-makers but often in different ways and at different stages of the policy cycle. This revised and updated edition of the book includes up-to-date data (2000-08) on the growing visibility and policy relevance of think tanks in Canada and the United States.
First the press became the media, and now the media have become the Imperial Media—or have they? In this timely and comprehensive analysis, Michael Robinson and Margaret Sheehan examine how the news media behaved (or misbehaved) in covering the 1980 presidential campaign. Using the media's own traditional standards as a guide, Robinson and Sheehan measure the level of objectivity, fairness, seriousness, and criticism displayed by CBS News and United Press International between January and December of 1980. Drawing on statistical analyses of almost 6,000 news stories and dozens of interviews with writers and reporters, the authors reach convincing and sometimes surprising conclusions. They demonstrate, for example, that both CBS and UPI strictly avoided subjective assessments of the candidates and their positions on the issues. Both gave the major parties remarkably equal access. But the media seem to give more negative coverage to front-runners, treating serious challengers less harshly. Perhaps the most surprising finding is that networks were not more superficial than print; CBS attended to the issues at least as often as UPI. Robinson and Sheehan find television coverage more subjective, more volatile, and substantially more negative than traditional print. But CBS behaved neither imperially nor irresponsibly in Campaign '80. The networks did, however, emulate the more highly charged journalism of the eastern elite print press. By blending the quantitative techniques of social science and the tools of Washington-based journalism, Robinson and Sheehan have produced a book that will be essential reading for students and practitioners of politics, public opinion research, journalism, and communications. Lively and readable, it should also appeal to anyone interested in the role of the news media in contemporary politics.
This exciting new book explores the role of government, politics, and policy in American lives. Full of real life applications and scenarios, this text encourages and enables political thinking. The second edition has been updated to include recent developments in U.S. politics and government. This includes the description and analysis of the 2016 elections as well as the early Trump administration. Chapters have expanded coverage of immigration policy, environmental policy, economic policy, and global affairs (including counterterrorism policy). The text also includes analysis of racial issues in contemporary American politics and law. It also addresses questions about the state of the economy, jobs, and wages. Hyperlinks and URLs provide "deeper dives" into various topics and examples of comparative politics.
In a new Brookings Essay, Politico editor Susan Glasser chronicles how political reporting has changed over the course of her career and reflects on the state of independent journalism after the 2016 election. The Bookings Essay: In the spirit of its commitment to higquality, independent research, the Brookings Institution has commissioned works on major topics of public policy by distinguished authors, including Brookings scholars. The Brookings Essay is a multi-platform product aimed to engage readers in open dialogue and debate. The views expressed, however, are solely those of the author. Available in ebook only.