Gallup & Pew Top 9th Annual Dubious Polling Awards for Election Polling Decisions

NEW YORK, Feb. 2, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- When the going gets tough, the tough, apparently, stop polling. That, at least, was the case in 2016, when the two biggest names in U.S. polling, Gallup and Pew, both decided not to poll the biggest political event of the year—the 2016 presidential race.

That double dose of timidity did not go unnoticed by iMediaEthics' director of polling, David Moore. In fact, Moore awarded Gallup Organization's James Clifton and Pew Research Center's Michael Dimock co-recipients of the top prize (The "Fear of Failing" Award) in iMediaEthics' ninth annual Top 10 Dubious Polling Awards, for their organizations' unwillingness to conduct pre-election polls.

Moore assembles the tongue-in-cheek awards each year to "honor" the previous year's most questionable actions in media polling.

Among some of the other dis-honorees in this year's Top 10 were the Public Policy Polling, which won Moore's "Counting Chickens Before There's Even a Rooster" Award for already conducting polling on the 2020 presidential election. The Public Religion Research Institute's polling claiming Republicans and Democrats are "polar opposites" on the phrases "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays" earned the "Inciting Holiday Hostility" Award.

Other winners include the "Reading Tea Leaves" Award for the Associated Press and NORC's biased poll on the presidential nomination process; and the "Gilding the Lily" Award for CBS News/New York Times, CNN/ORC, Bloomberg and Quinnipiac's polls on Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court.

David W. Moore is a Senior Fellow with the School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire and a former Gallup Vice President and senior editor. He analyzes and fact checks polls, always calling for the media to abide by best polling practices. Moore is a two-time Editor & Publisher's EPPY award winner for Best News/Political Blog for a website with under 1 million unique monthly visitors. His work can be found in iMediaEthics' Polling Center. Read the awards in their entirety at iMediaEthics.

iMediaEthics is published by Art Science Research Laboratory, a not-for-profit co-founded by its director, Rhonda Roland Shearer, editor-in-chief, and her late husband, Harvard professor and scientist, Stephen Jay Gould. iMediaEthics is part of a non-partisan journalism ethics program that promotes the media's use of scientific methods and experts before publication.

SOURCE iMediaEthics

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