Tag Archives: british polling council

Mark Pack

How did newspapers do at reporting their own polls? (February update)

By Mark Pack | Mon 8th March 2010 - 12:50 pm

This year we’ve tracking each month how good newspapers are at reporting their own political opinion polls. Getting your own story right isn’t perhaps the highest of bars to set newspapers, but on past experience it’s one they often seem to miss. But what’s the actual evidence? Who does best? Who does worst?

In order to provide answers, each time a newspaper publishes a political opinion poll we’re giving the report a score out of 30 based on how accurate the report is and whether it meets the British Polling Council’s own rules for political polling. (For details of the scoring …

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Mark Pack

How did the media do at reporting opinion polls in January?

By Mark Pack | Fri 5th February 2010 - 9:50 am

As I blogged last month, The Voice is going to start rating the quality of the media’s coverage of opinion polls, which is often far from perfect:

There is progress, helped no doubt by the criticism from Anthony Wells and Mike Smithson, both of whom are respected by many of the relevant journalists.

However, there is still much more that could be done to raise the overall quality of such reporting, so here at The Voice we’re going to start scoring each poll commissioned by a traditional media outlet and the way in which its initial report is worded.

Once the scores

…

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Mark Pack

Media to start getting marked for quality of opinion poll reporting

By Mark Pack | Mon 11th January 2010 - 12:20 pm

The quality of traditional media coverage of political opinion polling has been a common cause of complaints amongst political bloggers. The most obvious problem is when an opinion poll from one polling company is compared not with the previous poll from that company but against an older one because the intervening one happened to have been published by a different media outlet.

Whilst comparing, say, the latest ICM poll with the previous ICM poll is the most useful comparison to make, if that previous ICM poll appeared elsewhere, in the part it has got airbrushed out of report of the latest …

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Posted in Polls | Also tagged , , and | 3 Comments
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