The Public Opinion Paradigm: How the News Treats Challengers in Accounts of Polling

• In Event: 21054 - Media

Abstract

Social movements and their issues are featured in public opinion polling news, which has important influences on them. Amplified public opinion results can influence whether politicians will take their issues seriously. And how messages are received by people depends on how favorably their messengers are viewed, and public opinion polls provide popularity ratings. Movement-related polling news also influences how future news will treat movements and their issues. Yet polling news for movements happens in a standardized and often movement-unfriendly way, which we call the “public opinion paradigm.” On the positive side, unlike the unfavorable “protest paradigm” of movement news and like the more favorable political reporting of challengers, the public opinion paradigm does treat challengers seriously and addresses their issues. Unlike favorable political reporting on movement actors, however, the public opinion paradigm treats them negatively in several ways. Movement actors rarely gain standing, the balance principle works against them and their views, and their issues are portrayed simplistically and often misunderstood. And like the protest paradigm, the public opinion paradigm provides episodic coverage, hindering the assessment of movements’ potential influence over polling. Still, these episodic news results often harden into a conventional wisdom that usually works against movements. More generally, the public opinion paradigm portrays movement actors not as opinion leaders or as expressing broad currents of public thinking, but as potential and often negative influences on public opinion, which is understood narrowly as polling results. We illustrate this paradigm and these claims by examining polling news of old-age pension challengers during the first days of polling news, and Black Lives Matter protests from 2020 and recent polling regarding reproductive rights.

Authors

• Edwin Amenta, University of California-Irvine

• Francesca Polletta, University of California-Irvine