Should Exit Polls Be Released Before Voting Ends?
Scott Shuger is a Slate senior writer and author of "Today's Papers." Jack Shafer is Slate's deputy editor, "Press Box" columnist, and resident embargo-breaker (click here to catch up on the controversy and here to read Shafer's op-ed that ran in the Wall Street Journal).
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponHi Jack:
Because I, too, am amazed at how often journalists have one set of rules for themselves and another for everybody else and because I think polls have gotten way out of hand and generally love anything that takes them down a peg, it feels odd not to be on your side on the exit-polls flap. But I'm not.
In your Wall Street Journal piece, you correctly boiled the controversy down to the question "Why should news organizations care about voter turnout?" Your answer is, they shouldn't. This is where I disagree. Sometimes—as in the Weimar Republic elections of 1933—the press should even care mightily about which candidate wins. That's because a free press has a stake in freedom. I believe journalists operating in civil society have a stake in keeping civil society possible. For instance, although it's fun to bring down the mighty, the real reason we should be interested in doing stories that expose bad behavior by the powerful is because when the powerful behave better, society works better. And because a society in which folks feel like stakeholders works better for all, this same sense of civic journalism commits me to the view that almost always, the press should avoid promoting voter apathy. (I am a minimalist on civic journalism: I say it's not the media's job to boost turnout, but that one of its jobs is not to depress it.)
And I think the official Slate "let them eat exit polls" position is a bit cavalier about this, primarily because it casts the argument in purely a priori terms rather than looking at some of the facts of elections. In your Journal piece, you were content to cite one study finding that early projections deter less than 3 percent of the voters. But think about it, Jack—the 1960 presidential election was decided by a margin of 1 percent—a difference of one vote per precinct. How exactly would it play into your sense of anti-pundit iconoclasm to be willing to let Walter or Chet help make Nixon president in 1960?
Similarly, our friend and fearless leader Michael Kinsley wondered in a 1992 Time essay that is the locus classicus for your argument, "Why should knowing the outcome discourage voters for the loser more than voters for the winner, or vice versa?" Well, if all voters were as clearheaded as Mike, it wouldn't, but to assume that is to think of elections as much tidier affairs than they really are. For instance, based on the most recent pre-election polls, in last week's California primary, Gore voters stayed home in much greater numbers than McCain voters did, even though they all should have known that their individual votes were equally insignificant. And there were consequences: The turnout was unusually conservative, and as a result, the conservative positions on most of the ballot referenda prevailed. That's not the sort of consequence I want Dan and Tom and Peter to help achieve.
Your position gets its rhetorical force from the paradox that although elections are important, your vote (my vote, her vote) isn't. And this leads to a dangerous temptation: to reason that since my vote isn't important, I shouldn't bother. This is an argument anybody can make with equal force, but because that way lies general apathy, it's in society's interest and therefore, by the terms of civic journalism, in the media's interest, not to make it. Even when a vastly superior army assaults a minimally defended position, the first wave of the charge will suffer a lot of casualties, but it would not be very smart for the officer leading the assault to point this out. Voting, like an infantry charge, is susceptible to the "threshold effect": It works only if a certain number of people participate. And that's why it's counterproductive to remind each person that he/she has excellent reasons not to participate. Broadcasting early exit polls is just such a reminder.
But those reminders—about the dangers of going over the top first, about the pointlessness of your vote—are true. Which gets at the last point I'll make for now. Your position makes the plausible assumption that the press should always pass along the truth as soon as it gets a hold of it. Plausible but false. Reporters covering a war should often withhold publication of information the dissemination of which might cause a military operation to fail. If a police reporter learns of a single bit of information about a killing that only the cops and the real murderer know, he should hold off on publishing it until the cops have had a chance see if the suspect will provide it without being able to say that he read it in the newspaper. Of course, there are value choices beneath such decisions to suppress the truth. But the view that journalists don't have to truck with values, that they're mere conduits of the truth, just doesn't fit what we do. A workable society depends on sometimes trumping truth with other values. You still laugh at the boss's jokes, brides still wear white, and funerals still keep mum on the matter of worms. One of those other values is the false feeling that my vote counts.
Twitter and Google Couldn't Stop Facebook. Can Anyone?
Nine Theories for Why It's So Hard To Find Chocolate in China
Why Is Buttoning Up Your Shirt All the Way Hollywood's Shorthand for Retarded?
George Clooney Almost Convinced Me To Like Up in the Air. Almost.
Why Is More Than Half of Congress Still Not on Twitter?
The Best Thing About Alice: Kathy Bates as the Queen of Hearts
Highlights from The Fray:
[Ed. Note: please read after most recent entry in Dialogue]
Reporters are simply not going to intentionally hold back their predictions on election day. They are in the business of selling their papers, and that is that. It is up to the rest of us to minimize the impact of the early predictions on the voting outcome. How? Well, one obvious way is to close all polls at the same time. (The same Greenwich Mean Time, certainly not the same local time). The polls should close at the same instant everywhere. This might mean keeping the eastern polls open a few more hours. So what? Another way to minimize the impact of early polls and early primaries is to hold all primaries on the same day, and close them all at the same time. The way it is now, voters in many state elections (the ones after Super Tuesday) had to cast votes after the candidates had been selected. Those states that hold very early elections are trying to unfairly influence the outcomes of elections, and should not be allowed to do it.
-- Philip Rosenblatt
(To reply, click here.)
Scott clearly wants it both ways. He wants to be neutral, except when he wants his side to win. What consequence does Scott want Dan and Tom and Peter to help achieve? If press manipulation of voters or of voter turnout had caused the "conservative positions on most of the ballot referenda" to fail, would that also be bad? Apparently not. Scott doesn't like it when media action (arguably) leads to a conservative victory. That's not because he disapproves of media action. It's because he disapproves of conservative victories.
--TomFool
(To reply, click here.)
I disagree. Shuger does no such thing. His examples about exit polling depressing turnout and possibly affecting the outcome of Kennedy v. Nixon in 1960 or the California referenda this month were merely designed to show that breaking the embargo can affect the results, either way. He just expressed his personal liberal view on these examples because he presumes that his interlocutor Jack Shafer shares these views--hence, these examples would be most persuasive. I'm sure that Shuger would also object (perhaps not as vehemently) to early projections which tilted elections to the left. I think it goes without saying that neither Shuger nor any respectable journalist would advocate early release of polling data only when its expected effect would be to help the side you personally favor. This is a straw man which is easily knocked down but completely beside the main point, which is, does breaking the embargo have a nontrivial potential of affecting election outcomes (or at least turnout)?
--Steven Mulroy
(To reply, click here.)
The key argument here is very badly reasoned. Say a study showed that exit polls cut voting by 3%. The author says 'what about 1960, decided by 1%'. If an election is that close, the exit polls will show it. In that event, they won't cut voting, they may stimulate it, as people feel that maybe their votes will make a difference.
--frank cross
(To reply, click here.)
(3/15)