https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7292-4040
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ABSTRACT
Research has had very little to say about whether polling predictions of elections outcomes are biased in line with the political bias of the news outlets that commission the polls. This article examines the relationship between news media political bias and bias in the published results of media-sponsored pre-elections polls in the three Israeli elections that took place in 2019–20. Given that these elections were largely referenda on Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption charges – dividing the political system, the media, and the Israeli public into pro-Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu camps – media political biases are narrowly defined in accordance with news outlets’ general attitudes to the charges. Thus, polling bias is defined as a systematic overestimate or underestimate of the number of parliamentary seats that the bloc of pro-Netanyahu parties will actually receive. It is found that, on average, polls commissioned by anti-Netanyahu media consistently underestimated the number of seats that the pro-Netanyahu bloc would win.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Tremayne, “Partisan media and political poll coverage.”
2. Puglisi and Snyder, “Empirical Studies of Media Bias”; Sheafer and Weimann, “An empirical analysis of the issue of media bias in Israeli elections, 1996–2003.” Puglisi and Snyder, “Empirical Studies of Media Bias.”
3. Shamir, “Pre-elections Polls in Israel”; Weimann, “The Obsession to Forecast”; Weimann, “Caveat Populi Quaestor.”
4. Lichter, “Theories of Media Bias.”
5. Ibid.
6. Mullainathan and Shleifer “The market for news.”
7. Hamilton, All the news that’s fit to sell, 73.
8. Baron, “Persistent media bias.” The shift towards more partisan news in Western democracies has been demonstrated by numerous surveys of journalists’ attitudes and content analyses of news coverage. For a review of studies, see Lichter, “Theories of Media Bias.”
9. Terwilliger, McCarthy, and Lamkin “Bias in Hard News.”
10. Caspit The Netanyahu Years.
11. Yisrael Hayom, January 26, 2015 (my translation)
12. Times of Israel, September 1, 2019.
13. Weimann, “The Obsession to Forecast.”
14. Zaller, “The rule of product substitution.”
15. Strömbäck, “The media and their use of opinion polls.”
16. Petersen, “Regulation of opinion polls.”
17. Chung, “The Freedom to Publish Opinion Poll Results.”
18. In reality, however, most studies on this issue detect only weak and inconsistent effects of pre-elections polls on election results. See, for example, Moy and Rinke, “Attitudinal and Behavioral Consequences of Published Opinion Polls.”
19. Rothschild and Malhtra, “Are public opinion polls self-fulfilling prophecies?”bandwagon effect describes a change in vote choice towards a more popular or an increasingly popular candidate or party, motivated initially by this popularity. A recent study has found that journalists tend to interpret poll results in a “bandwagon way” much more frequently than in an “underdog way” (i.e. attributing changes in votes to voters favouring candidates that perform badly in the poll), which further increase the self-fulfilling prophecies of publishing poll results, see: Stolwijk, “Who’s driving whom.”
20. Shamir, “Preelection Polls in Israel”; Weimann, “Caveat Populi Quaestor.”
21. Globes, March 3, 2018 (my translation).
22. Shamir, “Preelection Polls in Israel.”
23. Katz, The People of the Poll; Weimann, “Caveat Populi Quaestor.”
24. Shamir, “Preelection Polls in Israel”, 74.
25. The predicted number of seats for the pro-Netanyahu bloc also included the Otzma Yehudit, a radical right wing party parties which failed to pass the electoral threshold.
26. For recent attempts to document the growing ideological tilt in the Israeli news media, see: Segal, “The Media Circle”; Hannan, “The consciousness Engineering workshop”.
27. I did not include Yisrael Beitenu in the anti-Netanyahu blocking bloc because the party was not aligned with this bloc during the first round of election campaigning.
28. Strömbäck, “Published opinion polls”; Katz, The People of the Poll; Shamir, “Preelection Polls in Israel.”
29. Katz, The People of the Poll.
30. Martin, Traugott, and Kennedy, ”A Review and Proposal for a New Measure of Poll Accuracy.”
31. See note 22 above.
32. Weimann, “The Obsession to Forecast”; Weimann, “Caveat Populi Quaestor.”
33. Globes, March 3, 2018 (my translation).
34. Eberl, Boomgaarden, and Wagner, “One bias fits all?”
35. Mercer, Deane, and McGeeney “Why 2016 election polls missed their mark,” accessed 5 July 2020. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/why-2016-election-polls-missed-their-mark
36. Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence.
37. Gabay, “Decoding ‘Uncommitted Voters’”; Gabay, “Peace begins at home.”
38. Camil Fuchs, a professor of statistics and one of Israel’s most prominent election pollsters, suggests that a selective group of right-wing supporters specifically misinforms polltakers who are hired by media outlets that they consider pro-left or anti-Netanyahu in order to discredit and embarrass these news outlets. Fuchs’ argument is based on rumours and not on hard evidence. His insinuation also refers mainly to exit polls, a specific kind of poll taken immediately after voters leave polling stations and meet the polltakers face to face. In an exit poll, unlike a regular survey, the presence of the news outlet is pronounced – for example, by use of the logo of the media outlet – because exit polls are uniquely devised for television studios on election eve.
39. Eberl, Boomgaarden, and Wagner, “One bias fits all?”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nadav Gabay
Nadav Gabay is a lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ariel University, Israel.