The near-year since Donald Trump’s surprise electoral victory has been filled with soul-searching and recriminations among those who research public opinion and those who write about it. A conversation around whether polls failed has hardened into two main camps: one blaming the data, the other blaming the media. But this […] Read more »
Authoritarian Warning Survey: In U.S., consistently high threat levels across all categories
Our September 2017 survey results demonstrate consistently strong concerns about American democracy over the past month, although slightly lessened compared to August. From August to September, ratings improved on every dimension except civil liberties. However, democracy experts still see American political behavior in 2017 as firmly outside the norm for […] Read more »
Fake polls — just a Trump put-down or a real problem?
At a recent press conference, Sarah Huckabee Sanders brushed back a question from a CNN reporter about a Fox News poll that showed 56 percent of the American people saw President Trump as “tearing the county apart.” She used Trump’s favorite put-downs: “A lot of those same polls told you […] Read more »
Early coverage of the Trump presidency rarely included citizen voices
Several initiatives have emerged recently to help newsrooms connect with the public, build trust and do a better job of bringing citizens’ voices into the news. But the news media have a long way to go, according to new data from Pew Research Center. Just 5% of the more than […] Read more »
The press, branded the ‘enemy’ by Trump, increasingly trusted by the public
Americans are increasingly confident in the news media and less so in President Donald Trump’s administration after a tumultuous year in U.S. politics that tested the public’s trust in both institutions, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Tuesday. The poll of more than 14,300 people found that the […] Read more »
The Media Has A Probability Problem
… In recent elections, the media has often overestimated the precision of polling, cherry-picked data and portrayed elections as sure things when that conclusion very much wasn’t supported by polls or other empirical evidence. … Probably the most important problem with 2016 coverage was confirmation bias — coupled with what […] Read more »