ABSTRACT
News organizations are increasingly attracted to the use of quick turnaround polls to support their coverage of breaking news events. Poll-based coverage often makes significant sacrifices for the sake of journalistic brevity and simplicity: infrequent discussion of complicated relationships that reflect the nuances of public opinion on an issue. This chapter focuses on a reanalysis of media polls conducted early in the 1992 campaign, lookes at whether there was a more interesting and examines news story than the obvious one presented through marginal frequencies for selected variables. Traditional journalistic approaches to survey data and the limited analytical skills of many reporters explain the reporting of marginals rather than the relationships between variables. The chapter concludes with news organizations could have provided their audiences with more relevant and useful news coverage with only slightly more analytical effort, thus more closely approaching their professed goal of informing the public.
