54. To what extent are journalists successfully manipulated by their sources?
Any reporter will tell you in their own words that they spend a lot of their time being pulled in various directions by many interests that want them to characterize an issue one way or another. Despite all this, reporters try to keep their independence and fair judgement. To what extent do they succeed?
I’m not asking about branded content or other ways independence and judgement can be compromised. I’m asking about reporters’ interactions and relationships with their sources in particular.
Internal polls are an example. Campaigns selectively release findings of their internal polls only when its in their interest to have them publicized. Journalists pick them up, especially for those races in which there aren’t independent polls as alternatives. To what extent does this drive the news just as the campaigns wanted, as opposed to supplementing and informing content only as reporters see fit? See below for a recent Politico example.
How does this vary from reporter to reporter, and from media company to media company? If you could measure reporter manipulation, how would Politico’s reporters stack up? Should media companies have policies to prevent manipulation?
Why political journalists shouldn’t report on internal polling
By Columbia Journalism Review (Steve Friess)
August 10, 2015
…
Reporters can be misled by internal data in myriad ways. Campaigns sometimes have access to multiple polls and “leak” the most favorable version. Questions can be asked in a certain order or with a certain tone that inflates a candidate’s numbers. Sometimes the “ballot test,” or horse-race question, is asked several times to gauge the effectiveness of certain political messages, but the figure provided to reporters may be the most favorable outcome.
A case study in what not to do is a July 22 Politico piece, “Internal poll shows Jindal gaining ground in Iowa.” In it, writer Eli Stokols reported numbers provided by the campaign of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal that showed Jindal garnering 8 percent of the vote in Iowa and placing fourth among the 16 GOP presidential hopefuls in that all-important first-caucus state. Stokols backed the Jindal camp’s notion that this apparent surge was the result of the candidate’s “strong performance” at a forum the prior weekend and quoted Jindal pollster Wes Anderson gushing, “Bottom line, Gov. Bobby Jindal has taken off in Iowa.”
Nowhere did Stokols reference any independent, non-partisan polling, almost all of which showed Jindal with about 2 percent support and wallowing near the bottom of the crowded field. The reporter didn’t explain the polling methodology, the campaign’s likely motives for sharing the numbers or forewarn readers to be skeptical. By contrast, James Q. Lynch of Iowa’s Quad City Times wrote about the same data, pointing out the struggling Jindal campaign’s reasons for releasing the poll and noting important background information Anderson declined to disclose.
Veteran political handicapper Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report said Stokols failed to inform readers that the data, already out of step with other polling and the conventional wisdom, may have been inflated by a strategically timed advertising buy. “This is about what you would expect from a campaign of someone within the margin of error of zero in national polling who just spent about $700,000 on TV in Iowa to goose their numbers, then took and released a quick and dirty poll,” Cook said.
Politico Senior Politics Editor Charlie Mahtesian declined to comment on the Jindal piece because he was on vacation when it ran, and requests for comment sent through Politico’s communications staff and to Stokols went unreturned. Mahtesian, however, noted that Politico has no blanket policy on using internal polls. “You apply the smell test,” he said. “You try and figure out what they have to gain by giving you this information and figure out what your readers have to gain by exposing that to them.”
