Media reporting and perceived credibility of online polls

By employing three different methods - content analysis, survey, and experiment - this study attempts to answer a series of questions about online polls: how news media report them, how people perceive them, and how people perceive the influence of reports of traditional versus online polls on the credibility of news stories. Our findings suggest that U.S. news media have increasingly reported online poll results since 1995 and that the public generally considers opinion polls found in traditional news media more credible than online polls. Even though the experimental findings do not show statistically significant differences in poll credibility and story believability between traditional and online pott story versions, there is a pattern of slightly higher scores for the traditional poll story version, lending some support to the survey findings.