Misunderstanding what polls, journalism are

THE Manila Times’ use of a poll as its banner headline on Tuesday (“Marcos bounces back in trust, performance”) reflects, in my view, its deep misunderstanding of both what opinion surveys are and of what journalism is. Opinion surveys are never ever treated as a banner (i.e., the day’s most important) story here and elsewhere, for various reasons I explain below.

Indeed, not a single one of the main broadsheets did so, including those that have demonstrated to be sympathetic to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The Philippine Star, which has become so pro-Marcos in its coverage and through its columnists (such as Philippine Ambassador to the US Babe Romualdez, a cousin of the now-infamous former speaker and significant stockholder), reported it only way below the fold, meaning it considers it as only the fourth or fifth important story to be reported. So did The Manila Standard, which is owned by Marcos’ cousin, the former speaker.

The Manila Bulletin, whose DNA has always been to be supportive of whoever is the current president, and the Philippine Daily Inquirer, whose colors had changed from Aquino yellow to Marcos red, didn’t even report the poll.

Only The Manila Times published as its banner story the poll by OCTA Research, a dubious pollster that I exposed the other day as manipulating one of its polls to falsely portray that Filipinos want Vice President Sara Duterte impeached, as the most important news on Tuesday.

In the first place, OCTA Research has become a shadowy outfit. It does not report who its board of trustees (or directors) — a requirement for nonprofit organizations, which it claims to be so. Since its start in 2021, the only human beings reported to be involved in OCTA are University of the Philippines (UP) political science assistant professor Ranjit Singh Rye and Guido David, a PhD holder in biomedical engineering. While David had given excellent analysis on the course of the Covid-19 epidemic in 2021, he has since all but vanished as an OCTA official, leaving Rye as the only person in the outfit.

Noncomissioned

Rye claims that its polls, including the latest one, are all “noncommissioned,” which means it is not financed by anybody but OCTA. He is taking us for fools: opinion surveys of 1,200 respondents would easily cost at least P1 million. Rye and David, with their UP salaries, could not have afforded this, nor would they have parted with their hard-earned money to find out how Marcos and Duterte are perceived by Filipinos.

Rye should disclose who funds their polls. If they don’t, I would have to assume that since the OCTA polls are sympathetic to Marcos — especially the latest one that claims his remarkable bounce-back in trust and performance ratings at a time when massive corruption involving billions of pesos has been top news stories — it is funded by the Marcos camp, its official information agencies, or by a government corporation as part of its propaganda to salvage this presidency’s rottenness. Since Rye and David are UP faculty members, it should investigate these two if they are violating the academe’s ethical standards on intellectual honesty.

Mr. Rye released a summary of the OCTA poll on Marcos’ performance and trust ratings through an email to 160 journalists, and the articles on this poll published by all newspapers that reported it are practically verbatim of that press release. He wrote in his email: “To access the survey results and technical details, please visit the OCTA website at https://ift.tt/EGikMuy or its official Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/OCTAResearch.”

However, these two websites, which are obviously near-moribund sites, do not explain at all the survey results and disclose their technical details.

Certainty

However, even if OCTA were a legitimate, professional polling firm and its survey complied with the strictest standards of correct opinion polling, its poll on “Marcos bounces in trust performance” cannot be a banner headline, as almost all newspapers didn’t, except The Manila Times.

A banner headline implies certainty and importance. It tells readers: this is the biggest, most reliable development right now. But a survey is not a fact in the same sense as an event (e.g., a law passed, a court ruling, a disaster). It is a measurement of opinion at a specific time, with margins of error, wording effects, and sampling limits. Elevating it to banner status can mislead readers into thinking it is more definitive than it really is.

Long before our local pollsters degenerated into cheap, shameless propagandists,” some of the sharpest minds of the last century had already exposed the intellectual fraud behind the blind worship of polls.

In French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s famous essay “Public Opinion Does Not Exist,” he identified three hidden assumptions behind every poll: that everyone has an opinion; that all opinions are equal; and that everyone understands the question in the same way. None of these assumptions, he argued, is true.

Artifact

“Public opinion is an artifact,” Bourdieu concluded. It is produced by the act of polling itself. Many respondents, confronted with a question they have never seriously considered, will generate what he called “forced opinions” — answers given on the spot, often reflecting momentary impressions rather than stable beliefs. These are then aggregated, converted into percentages, and presented as if they were deeply considered judgments.

Think about the absurdity of that process. A respondent who barely understands the issue, who may be reacting to a recent headline or even guessing, is counted equally with someone who has studied the matter in depth. A columnist who has studied the revelations on the delivery of billions of pesos stolen from flood-control projects to Marcos and his officials is counted equally with a farmer who doesn’t even have access to a newspaper. The poll flattens these differences. It creates the illusion that all opinions are equally informed and equally meaningful.

Journalism then compounds the illusion by presenting the result as a definitive statement about “what the public wants.” This is where journalism crosses from reporting into something else entirely.

The banner headline does not merely reflect opinion; it shapes it, as most propaganda does. When readers are told that “most people” support a position, many will be inclined to align with that perceived majority. The poll becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It creates the very consensus it claims to measure.

The famous American journalist Walter Lippmann understood the danger. In Public Opinion, he warned that people do not respond directly to reality, but to “pictures in their heads” — pictures largely constructed by the media. Polls, far from escaping this problem, are deeply entangled in it. They measure responses to those constructed pictures.

Many respondents in a poll answer a question that they may have never seriously thought about, and will simply invent an answer on the spot — what Bourdieu called “forced opinions.” These are not considered views; they are reflex responses, often shaped by the latest headlines or even by how the question is phrased.

Aggregated

Yet, these are aggregated, converted into percentages, and then — here is the journalistic sin — splashed as banner headlines as if they were hard facts. The result is an intellectual sleight of hand: an artifact is transformed into reality.

In an earlier column on a flawed OCTA survey, I showed how a cleverly worded question — “Should Sara Duterte face trial to address the allegations?”— could be twisted into the headline “7 out of 10 Filipinos want her impeached.” The ordinary meaning of “impeachment” is punitive, implying guilt. But OCTA reframed it as a procedural step “to prove innocence,” thereby trapping even supporters into answering “yes.”

That is not measurement; that is manipulation. And yet our newspapers, without even examining the question, headlined the result as if it were gospel truth.

Why? Because numbers impress. Percentages give the illusion of science. A figure like “70 percent” carries more authority than a thousand-word analysis.

But as the famous linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky argued, this is precisely how consent is manufactured. The media frame the issue, polls measure responses within that frame, and then the results are reported as confirmation of public will. It is a closed loop — a system that feeds on itself.

If journalism is to have any credibility left, it must abandon this fetish for polls — especially their elevation to banner headlines. Surveys have their place, but it is not at the top of the front page, masquerading as fact.

Because once you do that, you are no longer reporting reality. You are manufacturing it.

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Misunderstanding what polls, journalism are
Source: Breaking News PH