send to a friend | print | comment

UPDATED: On internal polls, speed and caution

As you loyal readers know, I’ve been using this blog in part to open up our newsgathering and editorial decisions to you in a transparent way. With that in mind, I want to spend a moment talking about internal polls.

They’re a tricky issue for we journalists. Even if they’re not conducted by actual campaigns, the groups who commission them almost always have an agenda of some kind. Often the data that’s released is spotty or incomplete. And such polls are usually only released to reporters if they support what the clients who paid for them are trying to push.

In the world of super-quick deadlines, this can pose problems. The instinct may be to publish absolutely immediately so as not to miss the story. I try and avoid this instinct, or at least provide readers with proper context to evaluate the polling data for themselves.

That being said, we will publish such documents at pa2010.com, even if they don’t seem totally reliable, because we have an informed audience that deserves to know everything that’s going on in the political sphere.

This came up yesterday, when a poll started circulating amongst reporters showed former Gov. Tom Ridge edging Senator Arlen Specter in a potential general election. The problem was that the copy of the poll floating around seemed incomplete, lacking a cover page, analysis or evidence of who actually conducted it.

I wrote this story about it. From the other reports I’m reading, it appears I was probably a little overly-cautious about things. It seems it was indeed conducted by Arlen Specter’s former pollster, though I need to confirm this still to be sure. I’m still trying to get the full document.

I will continue to keep readers apprised of the situation. In the meantime, know that we publish this data to fully inform our readers, even when we need to do so with some initial skepticism.

UPDATE: Initial doubts about the poll have proven unfounded. It was indeed conducted by Public Opinion Strategies on behalf of RNC commiteeman Bob Asher. Here is the poll memo.

May 6, 2009 at 7:19 am

--Dan Hirschhorn

Tags: Polls

comments

comments [0] | post a comment