The Poll Show

Yes, there definitely should be a TV program called The Poll Show. You can’t watch or listen to 5 minutes of any news or opinion program anymore without hearing endless political poll results, more than often qualified with the caution that the comparitive numbers results are “within the margin of error.”

In a way, many of these broadcasts have become The Poll Show, insofar that their content is mostly the reciting of the latest political poll results and commentary about it. When did polls replace real journalism? If there is but one election, why do we need literally thousands of pre-polls to try to measure emotion?

Guess what? The election itself is the real poll. But what would the vapid, endless news and opinion “shows,” and they are mostly “shows,” rather than true programs, have to talk about if it weren’t for these polls. And how can the pollsters find new and meaningful people to poll, over and over again, when most people I know hang up on pollsters or anyone else soliciting them by phone, if they answer their phones at all?

The great “Poll Show” is everywhere’ indeed, and one of the first election reforms I’d like to see is for the so-called news media to forsake most political polls as meaningless exercises in temperature-taking that fill time for advertisers and give lazy news and opinion commentators something to talk about.