Slovene Suplement, Vol. 13 - 2006, Suplement

Reports on Public Opinion Polls as a Specific Journalistic Genre

Maja Turnšek Hančič, pages: 75-91

This paper analyzes the relationship between public opinion polling and journalism. The author claims that the reports on public opinion polls have become a common element in journalism that should be regarded as a specific journalistic genre with its own thematic structure and visual form. Due to their mimicry of a scientific discourse, applicability to news values and capability of simplified representation of politics, public opinion polls are a handy tool for journalists to present themselves as objective mediators of public opinion. With the method of content analysis the author analyzes the attention devoted by the Slovenian daily newspapers to public opinion polls and the ways they are presented to their readers in terms of the semantic structure of headlines of the reports, and the structure and quality of journalistic reporting.

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