Exam script I

CONSTRUCTING PUBLIC OPINION.
How politicians and the media misrepresent the public. (4:22)
Source: http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=h_slmhM6qPI

One of the most important beliefs that people have about politicians is that politicians do whatever polls tell them to do. We hear a lot of complaint about
the lack of strong leadership, that politicians find out what the public wants and then they’ll pander to it, or at least they say they’ll pander to it.

Now, what this idea of the poll-driven politician creates is the impression that the political system may have all kinds of problems but on the whole, it’s responsive and accountable to the public. But once you actually start to look at public opinion in a more detailed way, what you discover is that the idea of the poll-pandering politician is really a myth.

For example, there’s broad support in the US for a whole range of policies. Polls show that most people support increased spending on inner cities; more spending on regulation on the environment; more spending on education; more spending on health care. We also find the majority support increases in the minimum wage, stricter gun control, and campaign finance reform.

In other words, if politicians really were poll-driven, then they’d be in favour of a whole range of liberal or left-wing policies, when in fact they’re not. And the question that this raises in a democracy is how is this mismatch between what the people want and the policies pursued by their representatives possible.

So, how do we explain this contradiction between the myth that politicians reflect the public and the reality that on most economic issues, they actually ignore public opinion? Well, let’s look at how the news media covers public opinion. When the media report on polls, what they’re actually doing is telling a story about what public opinion is, rather than just reflecting it. They’re constructing how we understand public opinion. And the news media have a lot of power here, because they choose what questions to ask and what questions not to ask. Ordinary people’s opinions usually only count inasmuch as they respond to that conversation.

Media influence on public opinion has been studied for many years now. We know, for example, that the media often play what is called an agenda-setting role. Public concern about issues tends to follow media coverage of those issues, rather than any changes in the real world. A few years ago, the degradation of the environment, issues like global warming, destruction of wilderness and chronic air, water and soil pollution, started to get a fair amount of media coverage. Accordingly, polls suggested this was one of the most important issues for most people. But then the news media started to lose interest, and even though most of the environmental problems had become worse since then, polls showed public concern decreasing. Or take an issue like drugs. Over the last two decades, public concern about drugs has

come from 3% to over 50% and back to 3% in polls. And those shifts have absolutely nothing to do with the scale of the problem, and everything to do with the volume of media coverage.

The power of the media to define what issues are seen as important has to do with the relationship between what the media report and what they don’t. Media influence in this sense is subtle but profound. The media can help shape
or modify what we know about an issue. The media create the impression of the American public has a real choice: you can choose Bush or you can choose Gore, the implication being that they’re both very different. But on substantive budgetary or economic issues, the differences between them are really on the margins. Both leading democrats and republicans support the privatized health care system, they support corporate-backed global trade agreements, they support maintaining cold war defence budgets, and they generally favour the interests of big business. But the media give the impression that democrats and republicans represent a broad range of opinion by focusing on civil liberty, not monetary issues, like gay rights or abortion, where democrats and republicans really do differ, and this masks the degree of the elite consensus.