The Media
By TOM LITTLEWOOD

Sparks, polls and public enlightenment

IN THIS MAD election year of such wildly swirling political currents, the opinion polls were often beside the point while much of the campaign coverage clung to the personality-oriented "sparks" school of reporting — which judges the newsworthiness of an event by the sparks it generates.

Throughout the year, the mercurial personality of an eminently newsworthy noncandidate, Jane Byrne, dominated Chicago news of, first, the presidential primary and then the race for state's attorney of Cook County. In this instance it might be concluded that the parochialism for which the Chicago media are regularly criticized actually came closer to an understanding of the national significance of what was happening by emphasizing the fissures in the Democratic machine.

The sparks standard, however, as applied literally by the Illinois Associated Press, worked less well in the reporting of the important U.S. Senate campaign. The AP's story of the Dix-on-O'Neal debate in Belleville led with the disappointing news that everyone "kept waiting for the sparks to fly again" but "nary a word was heard" about the campaign finance controversy. The two candidates "traded barbs" in their first meeting, according to the AP, and "it didn't take long for the smouldering campaign funding feud to flare" again at the second.

Alan Dixon and Dave O'Neal were state officeholders with long records of political activity beginning in St. Clair County. A searching in-depth study of who these men are, where they came from, and how they performed over the years in their public and personal business lives, would have given the voters information on which to make judgments about character and capability.

To its credit, AP did interview the candidates on the issues — although I'm not sure how much good it does to ask O'Neal what Don Rumsfeld rehearsed him to say about this or that weapons system, without supplying the needed background information.

Just before the election, the AP surveyed "the state's political pulse," indicating that President Carter would narrowly win Illinois. The Sun-Times' straw poll and some political scientists (notoriously uninformed usually about what is going on here and now) were cited as the pulsetakers.

As a cost-cutting measure, the Sun-Times polled in 28 representative downstate counties, instead of the 40 two years ago, and collected 33,000 sample ballots overall instead of the 50,000 in 1978.

The first round of canvassing put Carter six points ahead, but by the second round he had fallen slightly behind and the movement was clearly in Ronald Reagan's direction.

In mid-October, a time when polls printed by both Chicago papers showed Carter in front, the two Gannett-owned newspapers in Illinois disagreed over the soundness of a telephone poll commissioned by the group's news service in Washington and carried out by a firm in Michigan. The Rockford Register-Star discontinued the remainder of the series after publishing the first report, which had Reagan ahead by an unlikely 18 points and Dixon and O'Neal running neck and neck. "The sample appeared to be heavily skewed Republican," said managing editor Charles Morris. The Danville Commercial News considered the hugh variance between the Gannett figures and those carried by the Chicago papers, and went ahead with them anyway. "When there's a variance between the polls, why should we assume ours is wrong?" asked Danville managing editor Charles Carpenter.

Sun-Times pollsters had a new reason to be nervous this year: the unusually large undecided vote so late in the campaign. The straw poll method, going around the state and inviting people at unscientifically selected outdoor locations to mark their choices secretly, is not designed to cope with the undecided. Some barely leaning voters are polled and others are not, but in either case the effect is to blur the "snapshot" of voter attitudes.

These methodological deficiencies are never explained to the readers. Nevertheless, the straw poll lives under a lucky star. Once again it accomplished its chief purpose — to attract national attention to the Sun-Times — without finishing far off course.

On a positive note, the Statehouse press deserves praise for its generally distinguished reporting of the referendum campaign to abolish the cumulative voting system of minority representation in the Illinois House. This was a complicated issue that could have been totally blighted by the fulminations of lobbyists, incumbents and overwrought editorial writers. But many of the analytical stories were first rate. Bob Springer's examination of the historical origins for the AP; Robert Kieckhefer's United Press International story of the arithmetic of legislative power; St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter William Lambrecht's look at Pat Quinn's "coalition" of petition passers as a continuing political force in the state; and consistently excellent work by Charles Wheeler in the Sun-Times, Jeff Brody in The State Journal-Register and Mike Briggs in the Lee Newspapers, are a few examples of good, balanced, informative reporting of the cutback proposal.

34/December 1980/Illinois Issues