Wide Area News
Taking our temperature
by Russell Brown
How much faith should we put in media opinion polls?
Opinion polls are a fact of life in the modern media environment. They are a news organisation’s investment in a story it can “own” and others can’t. And they fill space in the absence of other news – witness the way the New Zealand Herald artfully strings out the results of its DigiPoll surveys over days or even weeks.
With any luck, poll results will be sufficiently newsworthy to be carried by other media. And occasionally they will pick up something seismic: witness the BRC political poll showcased by the Sunday Star-Times last February, which suggested that Labour’s long-time polling lead had evaporated in the wake of Don Brash’s Orewa speech, and it was suddenly level-pegging with National.
It seemed so far out of line that it wasn’t until a One News/Colmar Brunton poll two weeks later showed National opening up a seven-point lead that the political story of the first half of 2004 was really established. Intriguingly, only a month after spraying its “shock” poll all over its front page, the Star-Times relegated a follow-up poll by the same company – showing Labour creeping back into the lead – to page eight of the paper. Business as usual is not such compelling news.
Which may go some way towards explaining the odd handling of other poll results in the news pages of the Star-Times of January 16 this year. The paper’s “Focus” section obtained a copy of the polling company UMR Research’s 2005 “Mood of the Nation” report, an overview of trends revealed through 2004 in the company’s monthly omnibus survey, that, among other things, provides political polling data purchased on a regular basis by the National Business Review.
The 59-page report was intelligently analysed by staff writer Ruth Laugesen, and well presented on pages two and three of “Focus”. Laugesen noted the continuing mood of optimism among respondents, and said that the issue “outrunning every other” in 2004 had been race relations, which peaked in February (with 40 percent of respondents saying that Treaty and race issues were the country’s biggest problem) and averaged 28 percent over the year.
And yet, a story on page five of the same edition of the paper was headlined “Morals, ethics top New Zealanders’ list of concerns”. It was only in the final paragraph that it was noted that, actually, race relations had topped the poll. “Moral/ethical decline” didn’t even come second over the year; it came sixth.
The emergence of concern over “moral” issues – civil unions and prostitution law reform, for example – is not in itself a contrivance. UMR director Tim Grafton says that subjects are not prompted on issues, but asked to name their concerns, which are then put into categories by researchers.
Concern over such moral issues averaged five percent in 2004, starting at three percent in January and spiking at 11 percent in November, at the height of the civil unions furore. It was fair enough for a “Focus” sub-head to say that “unemployment was less of a concern than it was, but we’re getting worried about our ethics”, but it might have been useful to point out that, by December, when the Civil Unions Bill was passed, concern had already fallen to nine percent. So why the strange treatment in the news pages?
“We simply provided the data – and the data is then presented as the paper sees fit,” says Grafton. “We don’t write the headlines or the copy around it. Why I say that is they may have made more of that issue than is necessarily reflected in the data … We plot them month by month, and it just happens that, toward the end of last year, that category jumped up into the top six. But the overwhelming top issue last year was race relations – by a country mile.”
It is not that (with the exception of a sensational and inaccurate story on teen sex and the law last year) the Star-Times has a particularly conservative moral agenda. Indeed, it has wrung a series of stories out of the wealthy lifestyle of Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki. But, not for the first time, it would seem that parts of the media are rather too keen to talk up a moral backlash for the editorial fizz it brings.
Frankly – and its crumbling SIS scoop notwithstanding – the Star-Times is so clearly outperforming its would-be rival, the Herald on Sunday, in hard-news gathering, it hardly needs the help.
The UMR review also sought, for the first time since 2002, the views of New Zealanders on their institutions. Unsurprisingly, the media in general were not widely trusted – enjoying a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence of only 29 percent of respondents. But, oddly, television news – whose very format militates against depth and tends to distort issues through the lens of human interest – is far more trusted, earning the confidence of 48 percent of those surveyed.
The BBC’s growing success with digital terrestrial transmission (DTT) will be of interest to TVNZ. DTT broadcasts a digital TV signal to existing rooftop aerials, rather than via satellite or cable.
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