Introduction: I’d to welcome everybody, our audience and participants. We have a fascinating and timely topic today, “Political Polling and the Media,” and we’re hoping to address a number of questions about polling in this election cycle – the influence of the polls on voters and on the candidates themselves; whether the polls inform more than they mislead; how media partnerships with polling organizations affect the outcome of polling data; and are there too many horse race stories and not enough exploration of the issues.

It’s very clear we live in an information society and polling is a part of that.  It adds to the masses of information that are available to us all and that we have to try and digest and make sense of.  It’s clear too that polling is – any company that’s wanting to launch a product, to explore a possibility is going to do market research that relies on polling, and polling has particularly become a very central and crucial part of political campaigns, both for the campaigns themselves to understand voters and how they’re thinking and what they’ll react to, and for media who are reporting on those campaigns.

The question, I think, is whether, as in subatomic physics where the act of observation of subatomic phenomena can actually affect and alter the reality you’re trying to observe, whether the act of polling affects and alters the political realities and attitudes that you’re trying to observe, and if so, what should be done about that.

I think we have a very interesting and timely topic, and we can perhaps touch on some of these issues of whether there’s a limit to what polling can cover or when polls take place.  Recently Taiwan had elections in which a new president was elected.  Taiwan has a law that prevents the publishing of political polls, election polls in a period of 10 days before election takes place because of the fear that the polls may influence people to act and vote in ways other than they would without the polls. We have a very fascinating topic here to look at and discuss and a very varied and interesting and well qualified panel here to discuss it.