Junk-food journalism

Political opinion polls in newspapers are little more than junk-food journalism. They may fill acres of newsprint and provide a warm feeling for an editor who gets to fill space conveniently, but they are almost worthless journalistically, devoid of any worthwhile intellectual nutrition.

The figures produced are of limited, if any, interest to the general public and probably already known to the political insiders who do their own tracking polls as well as conducting qualitative research to accompany the quantitative stuff.

Devotees of political intrigue know that ultimately the figures produced by opinion polls, when a real election comes, will be wrong, have to be wrong. Opinions will change, new events will have had an influence and our proportional representation voting system throws up unexpected results in constituencies. What does it matter what a sample of people think now when there is no election likely for another 17 months?

Yet some newspapers spend a fortune on these devices instead of investing resources in real journalism. It would not surprise if the Irish Times, for example, spent about €100,000 per annum on polls. The question then is why?

It is partly as a comfort blanket to cover those periods when it is anticipated that news will be slow and pages hard to fill. (There are few things more irritating for an editor who has commissioned an expensive poll with the intention of filling the front page and pages inside with it to then find a real story emerging that demands more attention. The real story might not always get the attention, once an investment has to be justified).

In truth, however, opinion polls are marketing campaigns for a newspaper title dressed up as news. Broadcasters, especially RTÉ, are guilty of treating opinion polls with a degree of importance and reverence that is not deserved, something the newspapers play on to their own benefit.

The nine o'clock news on RTÉ television, for example, will probably feature the results of a poll prominently, with graphics attached, and may do so again on a second night if the poll results are spread over a number of days. Given that the newspaper is giving a broadcaster prior rights to the “information” it has commissioned, the night before the newspaper is available to its own readers, how could this be described as anything other advertising, albeit under the cover of news rather than during the official commercial break? It is better than advertising though, in that it slips through in a more acceptable guise.

The Irish Times got three days of free publicity out of its latest poll, even though it kept the most interesting piece of information – that 78 per cent of people believe work permits should be introduced for foreigners – to the third day. That was far more salient to public discourse than the “popularity” of parties and their leaders.

Meanwhile, better journalism does not get the prominence it deserves. Last week for example, the Irish Times used the Freedom of Information Act to gather important information about health and safety inspections in crèches. This is the type of thing that newspapers should do on behalf of readers. Parents in Galway, Mayo and Sligo got to know things about standards in named crèches that they might not otherwise have known.

However, the Irish Times did not publish information for the rest of the country. Instead, it blamed many of the ten Health Service Executive regions for refusing to provide the information prior to the payment of “substantial” deposits on search and retrieval fees. The figures obtained from the west were provided for free, but some areas looked for deposits of up to €250 and estimated charges for work done by public servants in collecting the information at over €800 in total. Some did not even answer, but it seems, from the tenor of the newspaper's coverage, that it could have cost around €8,000 to have done the job in full. Which is a lot of money for a newspaper to invest.

It was not clear from the coverage whether these payments have been made and whether parents can look forward to a full nationwide survey of health and safety at crèches in the coming weeks. Hopefully the Irish Times has done this, in which case congratulations should be offered (and the paper could usefully put the full details onto its website, because its findings on crèches in the west were only published partially and given little of the space devoted to the political opinion polls).

Remember, expensive as it might be, the cost of providing such a useful service to readers would still be only a fraction of that involved in publishing an opinion poll.