Sociologist Herbert Gans says the news media should do a better job noting that “polls are answers to questions rather than opinions,” and that not all opinions have the same intensity — or the same impact.
Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Herbert Gans is a professor emeritus in sociology at Columbia University. He is the author of, among other books, Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time (1979), one of the most important sociological accounts of how journalists do their work.
