Just to clarify, I don’t mean to tar all journalists with my critique. My concern is opinion leaders like the Washington Post, New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. These organizations not only report on opinion polls, they also sponsor them. Journalists in these organizations can easily find themselves in a conflict of interest, torn between questioning the accuracy or validity of their own polls, and writing stories that are guaranteed to attract a large readership. The impact of these polls in society is also greatly enhanced by their cosponsorship with TV outlets like CBS News, ABC News, and NBC News. Together, these opinion leaders wield inordinate power to influence public opinion in addition to simply disseminating poll findings. The evidence from across the full spectrum of public opinion polling strongly suggests however that in the area of interpreting public opinion polls, they have not done a very good job.

I agree. We seem to stumble from one near crisis to the next, but we keep on stumbling forward all the same. That doesn’t mean the next crisis won’t knock us for a fall, however. As I tell my students, our political system is an ongoing experiment with no guarantee of a positive outcome. It takes effort and leadership to get it right.

I read your very interesting post and largely agree with it, with one small caveat. It is, as you say, a more newsworthy story to say that the public is deeply divided, and as I think I demonstrated in my last post, the media largely plays up those aspects of a poll that suggest growing partisan polarization, while ignoring countervailing poll results that indicate, for example, that the public is becoming more tolerant of opposing views. The one small caveat is that while we tend to generalize about “the media”, there are occasional exceptions to this general tendency on the part of most journalists to promote the perception of a polarized public. I would want to tar everyone in the business with the same brush.