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In reality, polling companies are almost always scrutinized after an election event anywhere in the world, no matter what. during the campaigns they claim to reflect (although they also claim to guide) the opinion of the voters.
But the 2020 US elections seem to push polling companies further into a credibility crisis, which would also be dragging the media.
This Wednesday, the day that followed the election day that confronts the US president and Republican candidate Donald Trump with the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, several analysts and journalists in Colombian media drew attention to the blunder of the pollsters and the media, and put them all in the basket of losers.
Now, two days after the elections and the results are still unknown, a fact that distances reality even more from the predictions and estimates of the pollsters and the media (which gave Biden the winner by a significant margin), the newspaper La República makes observations starting from a basic reflection: the survey is “a millionaire business” based on “monitoring public opinion and predicting their behavior from small samples that can be extended to large universes or populations.”
Two weeks before the elections last Tuesday, Biden leads Trump by nine percentage points nationally, according to the average of RealClearPolitics surveys, cited by the AFP agency.
The economic newspaper considers in its editorial that “It is no accident that the major consumers of the product offered by the polling firms are the media.“, And then he points out the cause of the” crisis “in which both are” immersed “: the” strong growth of social networks and alternative digital media, two players previously non-existent or not taken into account by the hegemony of the informational and opinion research companies”.
That reason is precisely what, in the opinion of this newspaper, is making the paths of pollsters and media are “separating”. The Republic notes that newspapers, radios and television channels “are turning to the digital dimension with all the tools that this offers them,” while pollsters “continue to cling to outdated methodologies focused on call centers, armies of pollsters, telephone calls, physical sample points or by using the free forms that emails put at your fingertips ”.
He also warns that the majority of pollsters in the world now “prefer to dedicate themselves to conducting market research and consumer behavior than to follow in the exhausting 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 ”.
Then he 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 link that is making water. […] The digital leap of people is enormous and has not yet been interpreted by the pollsters ”.
Jorge Fernández Menéndez, at Excélsior, from Mexico, says it in his own way: “Let’s not kid ourselves: there was no blue wave, Biden did not win overwhelmingly as the polls predicted, that continue to show that they do not achieve effective measurements in an age where 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. She writes in El Universal, also from that country, that the role of the media and pollsters in the US election contributed “to the extremist environment”, and that “the election was reached with the image of a Biden who would win overwhelmingly, which allowed Trump to have the defense cartridges ready. When the numbers did not indicate a victory, the population was dislodged and Trump came out to disqualify the process.
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