Tag Archives: Opinion polls

Fight!

POLL1

A Red C poll in The Sunday Business Post last November

The managing director of Red C, Richard Colwell, told RTÉ’s Liveline this afternoon that there will be a Red C poll in this weekend’s Sunday Business Post while it’s his understanding there will be a poll by other companies carried in The Sunday Times and The Sunday Independent.

Mr Colwell also said he believes the Irish Times will have a poll next week – ahead of Friday’s election.

Further to this…

Oireachtas Retort has a new post… on polls.

From the post:

Take the bemusement and sensationalism that greeted water protests in the latter part of 2014. Opinion pages and airwaves were full of amateur anthropologists scratching their heads as if they had stumbled upon a lost Amazonian tribe. ‘What is it these people want?’ the media wondered.

The anger and motivations were incomprehensible and this is the result when “politics” is ring-fenced as a game of swings and arrhythmic. Just think how opinion polls feed a narrative about ‘stable government’ for example. This is bread and butter on which journalists and politicians can expound at length. Polls put them in safe and comfortable territory. Now take the other media narratives polls have produced over the last five years.

– Fianna Fáil support static and the pressure this put on that party’s leadership
– Horror and bewilderment that Sinn Féin support, while reaching a ceiling, had not went into decline on foot of continuous real and entirely contrived outrages.
– The slow demise of the Labour Party
– The seemingly unshakable rise of Independents/Other

Acres of coverage was devoted to these stories based on little more than fluctuations within the margin of error. The water protests demonstrated that not only had all this polling left journalists completely unaware of public sentiment, but that the media by and large are unequipped to discuss and contextualise equally valid political activity that occurs outside the gates of Leinster House.

Opinion Polls (Oireachtas Retort)

Previously: A Local Look For Local People

Nothing To C Here