Fred Jacobs Asks, 'Are Polls As Wrong As The Ratings?'

Fred Jacobs

JACOBS MEDIA Pres./Founder FRED JACOBS takes to the company JACOBLOG to note, "one of the leftover questions that is consuming researchers, statisticians, and pollsters is how just about everyone incorrectly predicted this election. In some cases, by astonishingly large margins. The most inaccurate of them all was HUFFINGTON POST, which on TUESDAY afternoon announced that HILLARY CLINTON had a 98% chance of being elected president. While just about every pollster foresaw a CLINTON win, HUFFPOST’s prognostication was the most wildly off-base. Instead of a HILLARY CLINTON lock to break that glass ceiling, it ended up with DONALD TRUMP meeting President OBAMA at the WHITE HOUSE yesterday."

JACOBS continues, "If you’ve been involved in media research at the radio station level in your career, you know how this can happen. A room full of smart strategists, great programmers, savvy managers, and respected researchers reviewing 200 slides of data can still make bad calls due to wishful thinking. How many times have you heard someone say (or maybe you’ve said it yourself) that even though the numbers look bad, we have a good feeling about the format, a personality, a contest, or anything else?  And so you end up acting against the cold, hard message the data is trying to deliver."

Read the full post here.

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