Saulwick Polls Narrative by Denis Muller in 1984 I Was Appointed
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Saulwick Polls Narrative by Denis Muller In 1984 I was appointed News Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and in this position became responsible to the Editor-in-Chief for Herald Survey, the name given by the Herald to the poll conducted by Irving Saulwick. The same poll was published in The Age as Age Poll. The Herald had been paying half the costs of the poll since 1971, shortly after its inception, and had been sharing the fruits – stories generated by the poll. These stories were written in Melbourne by reporters on The Age and sent to Sydney according to an agreed timetable for publication. However, the poll was perceived in Sydney to be very much a Melbourne-centred operation over which the Herald had little control and into which it had limited input. This was the source of some irritation among members of the Herald editorial management team. I was told to exert more influence. I was also told to explore the possibility of finding a different pollster for the Herald, one who was based in Sydney. The implicit message was that the Herald felt beholden to The Age over the poll, and wanted an end to that state of affairs, as well as to be in a position to exert substantial, if not full, control over its polling, and to have the biggest say in the issues canvassed. There was a big streak of intra-corporate jealousy in this attitude. It was part of a wider view on the Herald that The Age was wrongly seen by a misguided public to be the superior newspaper, that it was self-indulgent, lacked corporate discipline, and was run by a managing director – Ranald Macdonald – was apt to make unsound public statements, for example by arguing for greater public accountability on the part of the media. There were also high-level corporate tensions between the two newspapers. The Fairfax company, which published the Herald, owned a controlling interest in David Syme & Company, which published The Age. However, by agreement Fairfax did not exert this power in the boardroom, instead allowing Syme to continue to operate as an independent publisher. The Age – and its strong- willed editor Creighton Burns (1981-89) – guarded this independence fiercely. Any suggestion of “interference” from Sydney was met with implacable resistance. Fairfax, for its part, wanted to maximise the advantages of having a twin newspaper to the Herald in Australia’s second-biggest newspaper market. It wanted, for instance, to insert a magazine, Good Weekend, in the Saturday Age. The magazine had been run in the Herald for several years and had been a commercial success. This was resisted tooth and nail by Creighton Burns who – with considerable justification – regarded Good Weekend as completely Sydney-oriented and, worse still, outside his editorial remit. He would be responsible for its content without any power to influence its content. The result of this and other disputes was that the relationship between Burns and his counterparts in Sydney – in particular Chris Anderson as editor-in-chief of the Herald – was characterised by distrust and ill-feeling. They would talk to each other through me rather than talk to each other directly. It was against this background that I was told to seek out another – Sydney-based – pollster for the Herald. I knew nothing about polling; had never met or dealt with a pollster. I rang Rod Cameron, who at that time was conducting Australian Nationwide Opinion Polls (ANOP), but he declined in four-letter words to have anything to do with the Herald. It was a mark of my naivete that I, as a representative of what was then the most politically conservative newspaper in Australia, should approach someone with a long history of doing polling work for the Labor Party. I hung up chastened. Instead I thought I should at least make the acquaintance of Irving Saulwick, however reviled his poll might be in the corridors of power at the Herald. I rang and asked for a meeting. “Of course. I would be delighted. Why don’t you come out to my home?” My first sight of Irving was of this tall bearded figure, standing like an Old Testament prophet in the doorway of his St Kilda terrace, his shoulders thrown back and his hand extended. He drew me inside and into his study. Yes, he understood the Herald’s concerns. He was glad I had come to raise them with him. Might we talk about how these needs could be met. He would welcome my presence at the poll meetings in Melbourne. He would be happy to hold some of those meetings in Sydney. I went back to Anderson: “We’d be mad to ditch this bloke.” Anderson’s preoccupations clearly had moved on: “All right, mate. You’re a thoughtful bloke.” This was his standard way of dismissing me when it seemed I had solved a problem. It was to be another decade before Irving’s position as the Fairfax pollster was to be threatened again. In 1986 I left the Herald for The Age, and as Associate Editor was now responsible at The Age for the conduct of the poll. Throughout the early 1980s there had been unease in the polling and media fraternities about the credibility of polls in general. This was a consequence of the 1980 federal election, in which the polls had wrongly indicated that Labor was likely to win. The main reason for this major embarrassment was that the polls were at that time conducted door-to-door at weekends, and it usually took two weekends to obtain a sample of 2000, which was the standard used in those days, especially for election-time polls. This meant that by the time the poll results were published, half the data were well over a week old, and a lot can happen in a week during election campaigns. In 1980, the Liberal Party in the last week ran a sustained and very successful scare campaign over home ownership and mortgages. The result was that the Liberal-National coalition won an election that, had it been held a week to two weeks earlier, the polls said it would have lost. Consequently, pollsters started considering using telephone polling in place of door-to-door. A substantial academic literature had grown up around this topic, and there were many questions about whether telephone polling would be as reliable. Taken as a whole, the literature was inconclusive. In early 1987, Irving proposed that we bite the bullet and try telephone polling. More ambitiously still, he proposed that The Age conduct the fieldwork in-house, using the largely middle-aged female staff who already existed to take the classified advertisements by phone. They were very well equipped for the work: intelligent, highly skilled in telephone interaction, reliable – and keen to do something different. They also worked in a vast well-equipped room with many dozens of phones and an in-built system for monitoring their conversations. The Age also had a computer analyst and statistician, Andrew Bunn, who was willing and able to devise and implement a system for in-putting and analysing the data. The interviews were recorded on paper questionnaires, which were then entered manually by a keypunch operator and analysed according to Irving’s specifications by the program installed and operated by Andrew Bunn. The sample size was 1000. It was an extremely efficient system, and allowed for very swift turn-around. It was trialled for three months in early 1987 alongside the door-to-door poll, which Irving continued to operate as a control. Over the three months, there was hardly any difference in the results obtained by the two, so when a federal election was called for July 1987, the decision was made to switch to the telephone poll. The final poll was conducted between 6pm and 9pm on the Friday evening before polling day, and the results were published in The Age and the Herald on the morning of polling day. Without exception, the poll results generated by this system easily fell within sampling variance (plus or minus 3.16%) when compared with the election results, and on one occasion came within 0.2% of the two-party preferred result of the election itself. This system was also flexible enough to be mobilised at short notice whenever major issues came up, giving the two newspapers a strong competitive edge in this area. Thus it continued until 1994. By then, however, the Fairfax company had been auctioned off by the National Australia Bank, having been sent broke in the ill-fated attempt by Warwick Fairfax Junior (“Young Warwick”) to re-privatise the company, buying back all the public shares with borrowed money, the interest on which even the so-called “rivers of gold” from the classified advertising could not pay. The new owners, a consortium controlled by the Canadian Conrad Black (later jailed for fraud), made a clean sweep of the editors and of the organisation as whole. At The Age, he installed Alan Kohler as editor with instructions to “change the culture”. Kohler – under whose editorship The Age’s circulation went into a free fall from which it never fully recovered – called Irving in one day and simply said, “It’s over.” When Irving asked why, Kohler shrugged and said, “Sydney.” So the polling contract went to AC Nielsen – in Sydney. .