Panelist Say Reporting Key In Covering Elections, Regardless of Medium

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How important is the role of media in helping voters elect a presidential candidate?

A panel featuring some of Chicago’s top journalists and DePaul University’s political experts addressed that question on Wednesday night at an event moderated by Andy Shaw of the Better Government Association.

It was part of the Carlos Hernandez Gomez Memorial Forum on Politics and Public Service series. Gomez was a DePaul alum who worked in the Chicago media.

Dave Lundy, president of Aileron Communications, a strategic communications firm in Chicago, said the mainstream media is no longer just TV, radio and print.

"The elephant in the room that everyone has to discuss is social media," said Randi Belisomo of WGN. "We get so much information from the Internet, which is not filtered through the media."

Lundy said there is more relevant content available on political issues today than there has ever been. The difference is that now is that consumers can choose what information they would like to receive.

“What is extremely depressing as someone who cares an awful lot about policy as well as politics is what I characterize as the death of facts,” Lundy said.

According to Lundy and several other panelists, many news outlets lack substance in a newscast. Too often, news outlets are using social media to determine what is most popular and incorporating that into news headlines.

Digital media outlets like Twitter and FaceBook are not entirely to blame though. According to veteran journalist and DePaul adjunct journalism professor Mike Conklin, traditional news mediums like broadcast, print, and radio, should be held accountable for delivering relevant information on the issues.

"What I would like to see is for people to stop treating politics like a football game," he said. "There's very little in-depth reporting at all."

Michael Mezey, a DePaul professor in the department of Political Science, agreed with Conklin.

"The coverage of politics and the election is like ESPN meets Entertainment Tonight," Mezey said. "It's more on the horse race, not the issues."

Wayne Steger, professor of Political Science at DePaul, isn’t as concerned with social media or the blogosphere's impact on news content. He believes the content discussed on social media is usually taken from mainstream news outlets.

"I'm not sure the social media operates without the mainstream media," Steger said.

Perhaps the reason behind the lack of substance in news reports is a lack of concern among citizens, Steger added. Both Steger and Mezey agreed that most consumers of news aren't paying attention to real politics. Instead, they tune in to sensationalized stories.

"If you ask a people what they remember from last week's debate, I think the answer would be the Big Bird response," Mezey said. "It's the sensational type of thing which grabs people's attention."

The danger of this is that the uninformed public becomes susceptible to misinformation. The average person is not watching media enough to see watchdogs and fact checkers, Steger said. Therefore, voters can be easily swayed by a single event rather than where a candidate actually stands on the issues, he warned.

"If people aren't paying attention they can't be skeptical about what is going on," Steger said. "They can't call out a politician when they change their position."

Steger said he feels people want to hear information consistent with their own beliefs. Politicians are willing to tell people what they want to hear and people latch on to it, he said.

Therefore, Shaw said, it is the job of the media to really dig and find out about the candidates, regardless of the type of media -- mainstream, digital or online.

"Media has one amazing power ... and that's the power to find out something that no one has ever heard [and] change the course of a campaign," Shaw said. "The biggest thing we can do is is to find really important things that re-frame issues and perceptions."

Technology, Polling Changes Allow for More Accurate Sampling

Published on redlineproject.org September 20, 2012

Technology and changes in sampling are giving polls a more accurate reading on the upcoming elections, DePaul University Political Science Professor Molly Andolina said Wednesday.

Because polling institutions will try to predict the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, it is important that they get an accurate prediction of who will get out and vote, Andolina said.

"There's a real art in trying to get the mood of the electorate to make sure that you include enough or not too many likely voters," she said.

Andolina spoke at a series of weekly lectures by faculty on the 2012 presidential election. The events are hosted by DePaul's Department of Political Science.

Institutions use probability sampling to collect a fair sample of the voters scientifically. This means that everyone has an equal chance of being selected to take the poll but should not select the poll themselves, Andolina said.

"We want to be confident that our sample of the population is an accurate representation of the population at large," she said.

The most common way to do this is through random digit dialing (RDD) calls. This is also the most effective way to use probability sampling because 98 percent of the population has a phone.

"It use to be that most campaigns didn't include cell phones," she said. "Gallup surveyors could see the trajectory of where cell phones were going and stated to include them in their samples."



Research shows 25 percent of people in the U.S. only have a cell phone. That percentage is disproportionally young people, majority male, and majority are minorities. Additionally, 18 percent of the populations have both a landline and a cell phone, however primarily use the cell phone.

Beginning with the 2008 campaign, the Pew Research Institute started doing tests to compare the results of landline-only surveys with cell phone-only surveys. Pew found that including cell phone numbers is the RDD surveys gives a more accurate sample. This is now a common practice among pollsters.

Aside from using the probability sample to determine who will show up to the polls, institutions consider barriers placed by our political system that will prevent some voting on election day.

“The most important thing to know about our political system is that there are some systemic elements that prevent some people from voting,” Andolina said.

Voting is a two step process because you must first register and then vote explained Andolina. Research shows that young people and people move around more are less familiar with the process.

"There is disturbing information about how misinformed young voters are," she explained. "They need to be registered 30 days before the election."

Institutions also factor last minute voters into the outcome predictions. This is typically known as allocating the undecided.

Based on the results from the 2008 presidential campaign 30 percent of voters were undecided before the conventions, while 20 percent were undecided following the convention. Ten percent of voters in the 2008 elections were last minute voters.

Voter participation has increased each presidential election. The 2008 presidential election had the highest percentage of voter turnout at 56.9 percent.

Andolina explained it is important to understand the past numbers in order for polling institutions can make an accurate prediction of the turnout for an upcoming election. According to Andolina, websites like pollster.com is good to reference because it shows trends over time.



Despite an institutions attempts to provide an accurate outcome of the election every poll will have a certain level of sampling error also known as margin of error.

Simply put, this is an estimate of likely difference between estimate generated by numbers and the true numbers in the population. The smaller the sample size the larger the margin of error.


"Sampling error in a really close race could really mean a switch of leads," Andolina added. "But the bottom line at the end of the day is who won?"