Bringing Public Opinion to the Public: From Polls to Media Coverage

In this chapter we introduce the main question of the book: how does the media bring opinion polls to the public? To answer this question, we argue that we need to combine different literatures on opinion polls and outline how a strong preference for change can explain biases in how opinion polls travel through several stages from their initial collection to how they reach the public. In sum, we argue that there are strong reasons to believe that the opinion poll numbers will not become news in an unbiased manner but, on the contrary, end up as biased news.