These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

A subsequent congressional investigation into the industry raised, once again, a series of troubling questions about the accuracy of polls, and about their place in a democracy, but a proposed Truth-in-Polling Act failed. Instead, polling grew and spread, as media corporations, equipped with computers, began conducting their own polls. In Precision Journalism: A Reporter’s Introduction to Social Science Methods, published in 1973, Philip Meyer, Washington correspondent for an Akron, Ohio, newspaper, urged reporters to conduct their own polls: “If your newspaper has a data-processing department, then it has key-punch machines and people to operate them.” Two years later, the New York Times and CBS released a joint poll—the first media-made poll. Critics pointed out that, ethically, the press, which is supposed to report news, can’t also produce it, but media-run polls exploded all the same.62