With this morning’s news that Rupert Murdoch has won his bid to buy Dow Jones and thus the Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth Wilner worries that we’ll soon see the end of a polling institution.
Competition being what it is, it’s hard to imagine that a Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal would be allowed to continue its nearly 20-year polling partnership with NBC News. Particularly when that partnership benefits business news channel CNBC, which Murdoch hopes to crush with a new, Journal-powered Fox business network.
She fears a return to the days before major media outlets financed independent polls and had to rely on data supplied by the parties. Mark Blumenthal says this prospect “is a sad one for those of us who value the best in political surveys.”
In full disclosure, my wife is the COO of Public Opinion Strategies, which has long conducted the NBC-WSJ polls along with Democratic-leaning Peter D. Hart Research Associates, so I’ve got an indirect financial interest in seeing that continue.
My guess is that Wilner is right. It wouldn’t make sense for Murdoch to work with a competitor. Further, from a sheer business standpoint, it makes sense for Murdoch to consolidate his polling expenditures so that Fox, WSJ, and his other American entities share the same data.
It would seem that the obvious choice would be to retain the Neil Newhouse-Peter Hart team and jettison Opinion Dynamics, which now handles Fox News polling. My personal bias notwithstanding, it simply makes sense to have their political polling done by people that leading candidates and the parties themselves rely on.
