MOBOCRACY: How the Media's Obsession with Polling Twists the News, Alters Elections and Undermines Democracy

Conservative fears of democracy as "mobocracy" and "undermining authority" are as old as democracy itself; political commentator Robinson updates these fears with a highly selective attack on media polling. He addresses serious concerns—rising voter ignorance, apathy and alienation, conflict-based horse-race politics, and the increased breakdown of deliberative democracy—but does so with little sense of the structural, historical and analytical approaches used by more progressive authors to approach these same problems. He claims inaccurately that voter participation peaked in 1960, rather than 1876, and he connects voter apathy with the welfare state, ignoring the high voter turnout figures in Europe's more robust welfare states. Robinson rightly identifies the methodological sloppiness riddling most media polls and criticizes the media for not discussing their data-gathering procedures, but he's guilty of the same crime—he examines polls selected on no apparent basis beyond his agenda of conflating their faults with the media's alleged liberal bias (which he asserts but never tries to prove). By insisting that polls saved Clinton from "the rule of law," Robinson ignores substantive arguments against impeachment by hundreds of constitutional scholars, as well as media calls for impeachment or resignation that contradict his claim that media agendas drove the polls. True believers will find a comforting elaboration of cherished beliefs—others will find much heat, but scant light. (Mar.)