Major French newspaper drops opinion polls ahead of 2017 elections

[Sunlei]

The editor of one of France’s most popular newspapers has said he will stop commissioning opinion polls ahead of next year’s presidential election, citing pollsters’ failure to predict Brexit or November’s US election.

Stéphane Albouy, who heads Le Parisien and its sister title Aujourd’hui en France (which are by and large identical, although Le Parisien provides local Paris news), said he wanted his journalists to focus on “on the ground reporting” instead of relying on surveys.

“We have been thinking about it for some time now, especially since Brexit and the election of Donald Trump,” he told AFP.

“But we want to avoid giving the sort of commentary that accompanies a horse race, always focusing on who is in the lead,” he added. "We want to concentrate, in depth, on the candidates and their manifestos.” Le Parisien and Aujourd’hui en France spend tens of thousands of euros a year on commissioning opinion polls, but Albouy insisted his new policy had nothing to do with cutting costs. “The media has come under a lot of criticism for being cut off from reality,” he said. “So we are going to prioritise actual reporting. It will cost more than commissioning polls, and it will make us work harder.”

http://www.france24.com/en/20170103-major-french-newspaper-drops-opinion-polls-ahead-2017-elections

polls were created in USA for use by RW propaganda 'fake news' medias like Breibart, Republicans-fox TV. 90% of trumps 'news' communication with 'his people' consisted of tweets from those 2 medias and 'the hill'.

[StevieM]

1. The polls in the American election were correct. Then Comey rigged the election with his lies

and the poll numbers changed.

[Hortensis]

2. Hopefully this experiment in...good journalism will be

a success and widely copied. Some media leaders are terribly concerned. They're not all like CNN's corrupt and corrupting Jeff Zucker.

Shocked as ordinary voters are, just imagine being a fairly decent person and waking up one day to realize that your work over the last decade was literally destroying your nation. That YOU were part of a corrupt, intrinsic dysfunction that, instead of an informed electorate, created anger, disillusionment, division and ignorance that elected a Donald Trump.