Excerpt from Patricia’s website, www.citizenjanepolitics.com:

Meet Citizen Jane
“I call CitizenJane Politics "The Modern Girls' Guide to Picking the Leaders of the Free World" because that's exactly what it's designed to be. This is where you can find plain-English answers to where the candidates really stand on issues. You can also find out when and where to vote, what all that political jargon means, and whether there's a debate next week that you might want to watch on TV. Finally, you'll see politics through the eyes of women instead of the eyes of men. God love 'em, but why are men most of the voices in the political conversation when women are most of the voters?”
            Patricia Murphy: I started Citizen Jane Politics after talking to a lot of women.  I worked in politics for almost a decade, talked to a lot of women, and friends, family members, friends of friends. People started e-mailing me, women in particular, saying, I want to follow politics, I want to know more about it.  I’m having a hard time with the way the information is presented to me.  And obviously if we look at how politics is covered in the media, it is certainly a horse race that’s framed a lot of times as even a competitive sport, a combat sport, a lot of metaphors to boxing and basketball and the Final Four and March Madness.  It’s very irresistible, I think, for people in newsrooms, sometimes men in newsrooms in particular, to relate to what’s going on in Chapel Hill with basketball and think that that relates to what’s happening in a political race.

            So I decided to start Citizen Jane politics to start to frame politics for women in particular, more as a consumer decision instead of some sort of kind of combat or a sporting event.  I think that probably what drives part of the reliance on polls is because politics is presented as a combat sport, or as something where a score needs to be kept.  And so I have tried in my work to present information to women with context.  I certainly use polling and I try and give context to those polls, but I try and tell women, please do take this with a grain of salt.  This is information that’s a snapshot.  It’s not laser surgery.  It’s not something that’s going to predict exactly the outcome. 

            One of my first interviews that I did was with the head of the ABC News polling unit, who’s just a wonderful man and just completely numbers obsessed.  But I asked him how everybody really should be consuming information from polls.  He had wonderful information for me.  He said that a key question for people should be who’s paying for the poll, where’s it coming from, why is it being taken, who’s behind the poll.  Obviously since these are on the Internet, you can click into the polls, take a good look at what they say, ask about the survey data, and just see kind of all of the questions that are being asked.  So it’s a better time to be a consumer of information, I think, where polling is concerned.

            But something that he said to me that is kind of a failing oftentimes in the news media is that reporters - and I think it’s true of reporters - are data-hungry but math-phobic.  They don’t like to get into the polls.  They like to look at the headlines, take a headline and run with it.  So that was a key piece of information that I had going into covering this race.  I went to Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina.  I have been all over the country covering the race and have seen how polls have been very helpful in reporting.  It’s a key piece of information for a reporter to build a story with.  You do your interviews, you go out, you try to get information from the man on the street, what are they thinking, and then you add a little bit of polling data to that and you have a  pretty fully formed story.  That’s kind of how it’s done.

            The problem, and I think the danger for political reporters, and it’s very easy to get caught in the trap, is when the poll becomes the news instead of the polling informing the news.  I think the biggest example of that was certainly New Hampshire, where it was kind of the mother of all maybe polling disasters.  I’ll be interested to know from people later on in the panel what happened in New Hampshire.  There are a lot of theories about what happened, but I think that in a lot of ways sometimes it was easy for someone reporting on the race to rely so heavily on the polls, to assume that that would be the outcome of the race.  I think that there was a failure not just on the part of pollsters – I wouldn’t even say it’s a failure of pollsters.  I think it was a failure sometimes of news consumers, of believing that that’s the way the race was going to turn out.  And also of the media for not giving enough context to those polls.

            I talked also to a lot of independents in New Hampshire after the race, and there was a question raised: Do polls influence behavior?  I talked to a lot of independents who went to vote for John McCain because they thought that Barack Obama had it in the bag based on the polls.  So obviously the polling said that Barack Obama would win it.  The average going into it was about eight points, and he did not win that race and certainly it changed the course of the campaign.  That’s certainly not to say that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have won, but I did talk to a lot of independents who really thought Barack Obama was going to win and wanted to keep John McCain in the race.

            Again, there’s no way to say anything more, that was just anecdotal evidence, but it was interesting to me as somebody who was talking to voters and whose psychology was affected by those polls.

            Then certainly as the race has gone on we’ve seen polls diverge a little bit from the outcome, and the question is, is that because the polls are wrong, or is that because events just continued to shape up in a different direction?  Or just sometimes to exaggerate the result of a race?  Certainly there was a poll that came out in California, the morning of the California primary that had Mitt Romney up by seven.  Romney did not win.  It would be interesting to know from people in California if that meant that they felt like they wanted to, again, kind of bring John McCain back from the brink.  To me it’s a fascinating way to see how it’s affected people.

            I continue to try and talk to as many voters as I can when I’m on the ground, but again, polling has to inform reporters’ stories or else you just have kind of a series of anecdotes.  So you have to rely on polls.  But I think the important part from my experience on the trail so far has been that it should be informing your reporting and not becoming the story itself.

            My last little bit is just to mention that on my web site before every race, as a way to remind my readers that we can’t rely just on the polls, I usually do a little horoscope for each of the candidates because my point is sort of a satirical point, but it’s to say that this is, in some cases this has been more reliable than a poll, is to just look at the horoscope and see what the stars had to say.  It certainly was the case right before the California primary.  I could send people the horoscopes if they wanted to see them.  But it’s just a way to remind people who are consuming the information that it’s as important for them to understand what goes into the polls as it does to just read them and call it a day, and certainly for reporters as well to dig into that information and give your readers context, and to remind them also that it’s snapshot, it’s not a prediction and they need to be voting according to their own values and not who they think is going to win in November.

Michael Marshall:  Thank you very much, Patricia Murphy.  She’s given us some food for thought there.  As a reporter, a journalist, the idea that reporters are data-hungry but math-phobic, that sticks in the mind.  I can see that appearing as a sound bite.  And the whole idea of the poll becoming the news rather than simply informing the news.  Thank you again very much indeed for your presentation and contribution.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Patricia Murphy is the founder of CitizenJane Media and the editor of CitizenJane Politics, a non-partisan website for women to follow the 2008 elections.  Prior to launching the website, she was Executive Editor of “The American Interest,” and worked for nine years in the U.S. Senate. She graduated from Vanderbilt University and holds a master’s degree with honors from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.  She has written for The New York Times Wire Service, appears regularly as a political analyst in national media, including the Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC and C-SPAN, and speaks frequently on media and politics, most recently at Harvard Business School.