John Harris is right that much election coverage is focused on polls that are intent on telling us what the election outcome will be, even though no votes will be counted until after 10pm on 4 July. It is not, however, a new issue.
The late socialist historian EP Thompson writing on the 1959 election in the New Reasoner noted that: “A psephologist is a man employed by the mass media to research into what people think the mass media has told them to think.”
Of course there are exceptions, such as John Curtice, who provide genuine and critical analysis, but Thompson’s point still stands 65 years on.
Keith Flett
Tottenham, London
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