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Description
SOL LEBOVIC was group manager of marketing services for News Corporation when managing director Ken Cowley observed that what the company really needed was a political opinion polling service. Lebovic said he would be interested in running it and was the obvious candidate because of his research experience and his Sydney University degree in pure mathematics and statistics, with a minor in psychology.
"OK," said Cowley, "so long as it doesn't interfere with your other work."
In 1985, Newspoll came into existence as an independent company, a fifty-fifty joint venture between News Corporation and the Australian market research company Yann Campbell Hoare Wheeler, with Lebovic chief executive. By the time Lebovic retired this year, Newspoll was a leader in market research in Australia and the pre-eminent political pollster. It has yet to make a wrong call on the outcome of an election.
This interview with Lebovic was recorded on May 22.
Frank Devine: There's an Isaac Asimov short story about a pollster who gets his techniques so finely tuned that on every occasion he is able to identify a single individual of such surpassing conformity that his opinion exactly matches the opinion of the majority. I suspect Newspoll falls short of this high standard.
Sol Lebovic: I wouldn't try to go there. We need at least a thousand people answering our questions to get a representative sample.
Well, it seems to work, but how is it possible for a thousand people to speak with the voice of millions?
Yes, I know it sounds pretty amazing when you put it that way, so small a sample representing 13 million voters and getting it right. But it's got nothing to do with big numbers. It's how the pollster selects the numbers. If the sample selects itself--when television or radio stations ask people to call in by telephone or e-mail to answer a political question, they can get 50,000 or 100,000 responses--the results are extremely dodgy. In the 2004 federal election, the Bulletin poll got, I think, tens of thousands of internet responses and, on the basis of this, predicted a landslide victory for Labor. But as we know, it didn't turn out that way.... |
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