If you read Inkl Originals, there is a fair chance you are the kind of person who accesses several news outlets a day. Even if you are disappointed by journalism and journalists, your behaviour would suggest that you care about what we write – and to some extent trust mainstream media. Why else would you spend your time with us?
Events in the USA have forced us all to contemplate the world of those who are living in an alternate reality. People who believe that the election was stolen. They believe this because they think they have evidence – and they don’t trust the word of government officials and mainstream media that tells them otherwise.
I guess we are all wondering who they are, where they came from, and how we might be able to reach them.
I have been thinking about this ever since October 2020, just after Trump had been diagnosed with COVID. He did a drive-by for the supporters who had rallied outside the hospital where he was being treated. I watched it.
There was man in a Q-Anon sweatshirt, MAGA hat and Trump 2020 flag who stepped forward in front of the camera as the President’s car drove past him. “I love that man. I’d give my LIFE for that man,” he shouted. His voice broke. The word “life” coming out as though through sandpaper.
I haven’t been able to get that man’s voice out of my head. I think about him often and wish I could have him explain to me how he came to see Trump as a hero.
Then there were the fridges.
In the weeks before the 2020 US election the New York Times published an interactive game. They had hundreds of pictures of the insides of fridges, and the task was to guess which ones belonged to Biden voters, and which to Trump voters.
I spent far too long on it. There were the stereotypical fridges – and these I guessed correctly, while feeling a little shamed in doing so. Dirty fridges full of beer – Trump.
But empty fridges – perhaps suggesting not enough food – were evenly split.
Overall, through dozens of guesses, I got only a little over 50 percent correct – no better than guess work. More significant, my score was in line with that of the hundreds of thousands of other people who had played the game – 28.5 million guesses in all.
Free range eggs did not mean Biden. Nor did organic lettuce, or high welfare meat. Sugary soft drinks did not mean Trump. A comedian brought in to parse the results told the New York Times that pre-packaged muffins meant Trump to him (he was wrong) and that peanut butter in the fridge should be grounds for disqualification from voting. (He’s right on that one, of course.)
What I had ended up with at the end of the game, I realised, was not a portrait of the components of the US electorate but rather a self-portrait – an image of my own presumptions and prejudices.
That, together with a scorecard that told me my assumptions were wrong.
So what do I know about public opinion, and why people vote as they do?
If we didn’t measure public opinion, would it even exist?
This might seem like one of those useless philosophical questions – how many angels can fit on the head of a pin, or does a tree falling in the forest make a noise if nobody is there to hear it? But it’s important.
Public opinion monitoring is intimately tied to the growth of media, and to democracy. Before democracy, there was no need for rulers to gauge public opinion and there were no scientific ways of doing so.
It was newspapers that first came up with the idea of surveying their readers – almost exclusively white middle-class men. Then, in the twentieth century, the American George Gallup came up with the idea of sampling a randomly selected statistically average group of people. By the 1980s, the polling companies had become so good at predicting election results that they began to drive policy and, particularly in Australia, the careers of political leaders.
They were accepted as an accurate measure of the real world. They were public opinion.
But are they? The observer effect has always been there. in 1947, researchers canvassed American public opinion on the “Metallic Metals Act” – a piece of legislation that did not exist. Seventy percent of those surveyed were firmly for or against.
Asked a question that they haven’t thought about before, most survey respondents, under pressure to reach a point of view, find it in themselves to do so.
Political activist and author Richard Seymour has argued that the polling industry doesn’t really measure public opinion. It produces it.
This remains tightly bound up with the news media. If we are asked about something we don’t often think about, we cast our mind back to what we have read or seen. When newspapers publish public opinion polls, they are reporting, in large measure, on the impact of their own reporting, reflecting their own assumptions about what matters. Or that is how it worked until recently.
Now that system is breaking down. Families no longer gather around the same television news bulletins. Added to that, young people, in particular, no longer have fixed line phones and don’t pick up the pollsters calls. The opinion pollsters try to weigh for that, but in doing so they are extrapolating previous results and weighting accordingly – and the world has changed. The media sources that fuel opinion have changed.
Peter Lewis, director of polling company Essential, has written that pollsters failed to predict the result of the 2019 Australian federal election because of “the perfect storm of declining voter engagement, shifting demographics and technological change”. He talked about how results could be weighted differently to try and account for those who did not respond to the pollsters call.
But I suspect the problem goes deeper. Public opinion polls only work when we are all reading and seeing the same things. Even then, they represent only the response to the questions asked – and those questions don’t necessarily reflect what people disconnected from mainstream media consider important.
Would that man yelling that he would give his life for Trump answer a pollster’s call? Would he respond to the questions? And if he did, would his undoubting intention to vote for Trump really tell us much about who he is, and how he is feeling, and WHY he is feeling that way?
In other words, do public opinion polls really tell us much about our fellow citizens?
Biden won the election, and by a comfortable majority. But the persistence of support for Trump, despite a great deal of evidence of his incompetence, suggest that a large minority of US voters is forming its voting intentions and political opinions in a fashion disconnected from evidence.
There is some evidence in the research that the gutting of local media – suburban and regional newspapers – is particularly significant.
People in towns that have lost their local newspaper have also lost their innate sense of the connection between reported news and their lived experience in a community centred on locality.
In Australia, research by the Public Interest Journalism Initiative shows it is in suburbs, particularly on the edge of urban areas, that the deepest news deserts have developed. And as we know, it is on the edge of urban that extremism of all kinds can too easily take hold.
Meanwhile in our regions, SkyNews screens free to all on the WIN regional television network, but at the same time the local newsrooms are disappearing.
The potential for political fracture is obvious.
The best antidote is that other media organisation with national reach – the ABC. But the ABC has told the current Senate inquiry into media concentration (which resulted from Kevin Rudd’s petition to parliament calling for a Royal Commission on the Murdoch press) that it can’t come close to filling the void created by the death of local media.
I have raised questions here without suggesting answers. Improving journalism is always important.
But let’s not pretend it is enough.
The people who are most disengaged, who are forming their politics in a different universe of “evidence”, are not reading inkl – or the outlets that make up most of inkl’s content.
We don’t know enough about them, and we need to find out more.
Local journalism of quality is particularly vital if we are to keep our nation democratic and governable. And meeting the audience where they are – knowing more – is an important mission for local journalists everywhere.
Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and the author of many books and numerous articles and essays. She is also a journalism academic and Honorary Principal Fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. She has won the Walkley Award for Social Equity Journalism, a Foreign Press Association Award and a number of Quill Awards, including for her reporting from the Philippines with photojournalist Dave Tacon.
Support quality journalism.
As an inkl member you can directly support the work of journalists like Margaret Simons, while also getting access to 100+ publications like Foreign Affairs, The Independent, The Economist, Financial Times and Bloomberg.
As part of our commitment to building a sustainable future for journalism, a portion of your monthly inkl membership fee will go directly to Margaret for as long as you remain a subscriber.
BECOME A MEMBER
