“Imagine polls don’t exist. Show me evidence Hillary is winning?” That was the challenge that Charlotte radio host Bill Mitchell posed for his Twitter followers just one week ago. It was an interesting request, given that polls have been used to predict elections with relatively strong reliability for almost a […] Read more »
Americans Increasingly Turn to Specific Sources for News
As the ways people consume news grow more complex, Americans are becoming less likely to view their news sources in terms of how they get news — radio, television, print or internet — and more in terms of who specifically provides it. CONT. Jim Norman, Gallup Read more »
The Modern News Consumer
Wave after wave of digital innovation has introduced a new set of influences on the public’s news habits. Social media, messaging apps, texts and email provide a constant stream of news from people we’re close to as well as total strangers. News stories can now come piecemeal, as links or […] Read more »
Automatic polling using Computational Linguistics: More reliable than traditional polling?
The outcome of the 2016 EU referendum did not only spell disaster for the incumbent prime minister and the Remain campaign. It also amounted to a PR disaster for the commercial pollsters, with YouGov, Populus, ComRes, ORB Ipsos-Mori and Survation all failing to correctly predict the outcome. … By contrast, […] Read more »
The challenge of false beliefs
Misperceptions about politics and health can undermine public debate and distort people’s choices and behavior. Why do people hold these false or unsupported beliefs and why is it so difficult to change their minds? An emerging literature examines the difficulty of correcting false or unsupported beliefs and the reasons for […] Read more »
News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016
A majority of U.S. adults – 62% – get news on social media, and 18% do so often, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center, conducted in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. In 2012, based on a slightly different question, 49% of U.S. […] Read more »