You’re well informed because you saw it there or read it right here

By Noel Whelan I SPENT one morning last week in the company of a group of journalists, officials, academics and europhiles listening to a presentation of data and analysis arising from an opinion poll.

The poll in question was a survey which the European Commission Representation in Ireland had arranged after the second Nice referendum last October. The poll was designed to find out why people voted for or against ratification of the Nice Treaty, or abstained. It also explored public perceptions, preferences and sources of information on European issues. It wasn’t exactly the easiest of topics to stay awake for, but there was coffee available.

The survey work was actually carried out by the market survey company formerly known as IMS, which now has a longer name as a result of a merger with one of the international polling agencies. The responses gathered were analysed by Prof Richard Sinnott of UCD who fronted last week’s presentation. Richard Sinnott lectured me in college 15 years ago and he’s a political scientist for whom I have a lot of respect. He is the type of expert in public opinion who can spot a statistical shift in attitude a mile off and can interpret the slightest bend in the line of a graph.

Notwithstanding this skill, even Richard Sinnott was finding it difficult to get the finer details of this poll data across clearly. At one point, Dr Garret FitzGerald, who was in the audience, interrupted the presentation seeking clarification on some point that Prof Sinnott had just made. Richard, realising the impact of what had just happened, stopped dead and said: “I’d better go back over that again, because I’ve just realised that if I’m losing Garret FitzGerald in a statistical presentation, then I have definitely lost the rest of the audience.”

However, I did manage to come away from the presentation with a couple of nuggets of analytical gold, mined from the poll results. I think two of them in particular are worth sharing with a wider audience. These nuggets were not about the Nice Treaty campaign itself, but rather about the forces that shape political debate in this country.

The most interesting slide presented by Dr Sinnott was a chart which showed how the public viewed the different sources of information on the issues in the second Nice referendum. Asked what they regarded as the most valuable sources of information on the Nice referendum, 73% rated television news and current affairs as “very valuable” or “somewhat valuable”. Almost 70% scored radio news and current affairs in the same categories while 64% regarded newspaper articles as a valuable source of information.

The only information source which came close to these mass media outlets was discussion about the issues with family, friends or work colleagues. Of course much of this interpersonal discussion was also informed and shaped by the media coverage.

Traditional forms of campaigning like door-to-door canvassing have a more limited appeal than media coverage of campaigns, although they are valuable means of galvanising voter support. Whereas almost three-quarters of the electorate regard television as an important information source, less than one- quarter thought leaflets or posters mattered. Last October’s second Nice referendum saw a dramatic improvement in communication and a 25 point increase in the percentage of people who felt they understood at least some of the issues involved in the Nice Treaty.

According to the research, this was mainly due to an improvement in the way in which television, radio and newspapers dealt with the issues.

Interestingly, when I pursued the point with him, Dr Sinnott pointed out that very little research has actually been done on the most important sources of information for domestic political issues. However, he felt that it was fair to assume that people who looked to TV, radio and newspapers for credible information on Nice last October were this week turning to the same sources for information and debate on issues like health, Northern Ireland or Iraq.

So it’s official, folks. Many of us had always suspected that television, radio and newspapers were important when it comes to political issues in Ireland, but I have to say I was surprised at the extent of their impact.

The evidence of this opinion poll runs counter to the cynical suggestion that people are not interested in politics or political debate. The power of television in public debate is phenomenal. The mass media matters to politics in what it says and how it says it.

I have always believed that when political issues are presented to the general public interestingly and authoritatively, people will tune in. Viewer and readership figures support this contention. News programmes are more than holding their own audience share at peak time. Current affairs programmes like “Questions and Answers” and “Primetime” still attract audiences as big as

“Today Tonight” did two decades ago. It is worth remembering that notwithstanding the attractions of soap operas and movie premieres, the Ahern-Noonan live debate and the election results programmes attracted some of last June’s largest television and radio audiences.

Despite the increasing number of music radio channels, ‘Morning Ireland’ is still by far the most popular radio programme in the country. The Irish are among the most extensive readers of newspapers per head in the world. More than 1.5 million national daily newspapers are sold in this country every day, and that is not counting the English newspapers sold here.

The other interesting nugget in Richard Sinnott’s presentation was that, by comparison, the internet is not important in shaping political debate in Ireland. Its impact on public debate is only marginal. In the opinion poll, only 10% of the people questioned rated the internet as a useful information source on the issues surrounding Nice II. This was the case even though it is estimated that about half of all adults in Ireland today have access to the internet, either at work or at home.

We have now had almost a decade of hype about the power of the internet. This hype has often extended to its likely impact on politics. In his book ‘Vote.Com,’ published in 1999, Dick Morris, the controversial former adviser to Bill Clinton, argued that the internet was “changing politics”. Morris maintained that the internet was already replacing the traditional media as the driving force in American political debate.

Well, it hasn’t changed American political debate as much as Morris and others led us to believe, and the internet has had even less impact on Irish politics.

Of course advances in information and web technology have had, and will continue to have, some impact on the way politics is organised. E-mail, for example, is now the main means by which political organisations communicate with many of their members and with journalists. However, those who think the internet is ever going to be as big as TV are fooling themselves, and are likely to see their credibility go the way of dot.com share fortunes.

So, the power of the broadcast and print media is confirmed by the statistics. Of course with power comes responsibility. Since we turn to them so often for our information on public debate, there is an onus on the media to be responsible, to avoid being cynical, to be questioning and where necessary to be confrontational.