ABSTRACT
There is a love-hate relationship between the media and the polls. Over the past 50 years, polls have transformed political reporting. As a boy in the United States, I can recall the radio interviews reporting from the hustings, the sincere interviews with the county chairmen who, when asked by the polite radio journalist, reported that morale was good in the wards, that the public mood was shifting to his (always his) candidate, and that on election day justice would be done. David McKie, former Deputy Editor of the Guardian and one of the few journalists who really took the time and trouble to understand the uses and limitations of polls, reported that he had researched the election reporting of the British press prior to the introduction of systematic polls, and found that the News Chronicle always reported a last-minute swing to Labour, while equally sincerely the Beaverbrook papers were reporting a last-minute swing to the Tories.
