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In fact, polling companies are almost always scrutinized after an election event anywhere in the world, whatever happens. during the campaigns they pretend to reflect (although they also pretend to guide) the opinion of the voters.
But the US elections of 2020 they seem to push polling companies further into a credibility crisis, which would also drag the media.
This Wednesday, the day following election day that pitted US President and Republican candidate Donald Trump with Democratic candidate Joe Biden, several Colombian media analysts and reporters drew attention to the pollsters’ mistake. and the media, and put them all in the losers’ basket.
Now, two days before the elections and the results are still unknown, a fact that distances reality even further from the forecasts and estimates of pollsters and the media (which gave Biden the winner by a significant margin) the newspaper La República fa observations starting from a basic reflection: the survey is “a millionaire business” based on “listening to public opinion and predicting their behavior from small samples that can be extended to large universes or populations”.
Two weeks before last Tuesday’s election, Biden leads Trump by nine percentage points nationwide, according to the average of RealClearPolitics polls, cited by the AFP agency.
The business newspaper considers in its editorial that “It is no coincidence that the main consumers of the product offered by the survey companies are the media“, And then underlines the cause of the” crisis “in which both are” immersed “: the” strong growth of social networks and alternative digital media, two actors previously non-existent or not taken into consideration by the hegemony of news and opinion-seeking companies“.
This is exactly what, in the opinion of this newspaper, it is doing the paths of pollsters and media “separate”. La Repubblica notes that newspapers, radio and television channels “are turning to the digital dimension with all the tools it offers them”, while pollsters “continue to cling to obsolete methodologies focused on call centers, armies of pollsters, phone calls, physical sampling points or using the free forms that emails put at hand ”.
He also cautions that most pollsters around the world now “prefer to engage in conducting market research and consumer behavior rather than following in the grueling political terrain where they continue to reap credibility defeats“, Because, among other things, according to this medium, politicians capture them” with contracts “and manipulate” the results of their studies when they are [las encuestadoras] they begin to apply the old methodologies “.
He then uses the central approach of his analysis: “It is not yet understood how pollsters work for parties or candidates and for the media; precisely a connection that the water is making. […] The digital leap of people is enormous and has not yet been interpreted by the pollsters ”.
Jorge Fernández Menéndez, at the Excélsior, from Mexico, says it in his own way: “Let’s not fool ourselves: there was no blue wave, Biden did not win overwhelmingly as predicted by the polls, which continue to prove that they are not getting effective measurements in an age when almost everything has changed“.
From this case of the United States, Maite Azuela also draws a lesson, first for Mexico, but which could be projected for all democratic countries. He writes on El Universal, even from that country, that one the role of the media and pollsters in the US elections contributed to the “extremist environment”and that “the elections were reached with the image of a Biden winning overwhelmingly, which allowed Trump to have his defense cartridges ready. When the numbers did not indicate a victory, the population was displaced and Trump came out to disqualify the process.
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