Readers in Council,
The Japan Times,
5-4, Shibaura 4-chome,
Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-0023
The place that public opinion polls have assumed in the political life of our democracies is disconcerting. It’s not just in Japan, but America and the U.K. are variously insane and malicious in their use and manipulation of opinion polls. It’s not that such polls are useless or unnecessary in a democracy so much as that they are misused by the media, much as Gregory Clark wrote about in his April 29, 2010 essay, “Media vultures circle P.M.” People forget, or they just don’t know that the meaning of a poll is mitigated by the fact that its results depend largely on language rather than on authentic issues - I mean, with how the questions are framed. Too often unimportant information is presented as newsworthy, which the powers then use as license to spin the ‘information’ one way or another - and sometimes in opposite ways simultaneously - to shape public debate and then policy. Polls can too easily be used as a distraction to take our eyes off the genuine issues, or as a substitute for educating us about them. Stories like “Hatoyama’s support rate falls to 20.7%” (April 30, 2010) evoke disinterest in me because I don’t see that it matters. I don’t care what the Prime Minister’s popularity is during his term. The only popularity poll that really matters is called the General Election, and if people are unhappy with the Premier’s work they can save their feelings until then. I understand that politicians are gamblers, and that popularity polls are used to calculate risk for the timing of elections. I do not appreciate daily reports of the premier’s estimated popularity. It’s ridiculous and annoying. But maybe I am wrong to think so.