Only one week into a six-week election campaign and, if you’re watching or listening to any of the UK’s biggest broadcasters, you already can’t move for vox pops.

Ironically, the journalists who conduct them aren’t necessarily that keen on them. Indeed, some of them actively loathe standing around in the street trying to get passers-by to say a few words while trying, at the same time, not to catch the eye of lurkers who, they worry, won’t ever shut up.

However, programme editors and producers love vox pops. Preoccupied wit the possibility that punters will switch off or switch over if force-fed a news diet composed entirely of politicians and pundits, they hope that featuring a smattering of “ordinary people” will both enliven proceedings and fulfil their commitment to promoting diversity, inclusivity and democratic participation.

I value those things as much as the next person, but I still believe broadcasters should bin the vox pop.

The reason is simple: vox pops can’t possibly provide us with an accurate representation of public opinion. Instead of enlightening us, they often mislead us, giving a skewed perspective that doesn’t truly reflect the balance of opinion in a particular constituency – nor the complexity of, or indeed the direction of travel in, voters’ thoughts and feelings.

An academic study of vox pops in the 2017 election, for instance, found that the views of voters that didn’t reflect the conventional wisdom that the country would have no truck with radical left-wing policies and leaders tended to get left on the proverbial cutting room floor – one reason, perhaps, why at least some parts of the media, notwithstanding polling to the contrary, failed to take seriously Jeremy Corbyn’s closing of the gap with the Conservatives until relatively late on in that campaign.

Vox pops, then, might seem like a good way to include diverse voices, but they’re often anything but because the selection process is far from random. The people and the clips chosen are inevitably edited to fit a narrative – and, as the research shows, often one that fits between fairly narrow bounds. Just as infuriatingly, they also suck up time that could be taken up by other stories or other, more interesting and more robust ways of telling the same story.

The counterargument is that vox pops provide us with some valuable qualitative, citizen-orientated content amid political coverage that is otherwise dominated by polling, punditry and policy discussion. The reality, however, is very different.

As anyone who’s heard or watched them will attest, vox pops offer overwhelmingly predictable, clichéd responses from an inevitably unrepresentative bunch of people who, for whatever reason, aren’t too busy to chat with a reporter in the middle of the day when most of us will be at work. Moreover, because “balance” is the watchword of broadcasters at election time, the typical ratio is one pro-government voice to one anti-government voice, and then on to a third voice who moans “they’re all the bloody same” and tells us that they won’t bother voting – hardly a message that’s going to encourage people to exercise a right that their ancestors fought and died for.

When asked for their opinions on policy, most respondents do little more than reveal their prejudices and their lack of knowledge – precisely what anybody who’s read Bobby Duffy’s eye-opening book Perils of Perception (which shows just how wrong most of us are about, well, almost everything) would expect.

In fact, the surveys and focus groups that Duffy and his ilk specialise in can provide programme-makers with a far more accurate and enlightening take on what those fabled “ordinary people” are thinking and feeling. The trick is for presenters and reporters not to get bogged down in the stats but simply to summarise and discuss their findings.

All too often, news programmes use polls merely to describe the party political horse race, when, if only they were to drill down just a little further, they’d discover a wealth of interesting material on what really matters to voters up and down the country, as well as giving us a guide to their attitudes on those very same subjects.

Of course, news programmes will still want to send reporters out to take the political temperature in a particular town or city. But instead of accosting passers-by on the high street or market (the latter a particular favourite because it can provide some useful “colour”), why not have them chat with people intimately involved in the issues that polls routinely reveal most preoccupy voters?

On healthcare, talk to a local GP. On the cost of living, talk to someone who works at the checkout at a local supermarket. On housing, talk to a local rental company or whoever does repairs for the local housing association. On child poverty, talk to teachers who are bringing in food, clothing and toiletries for some of the kids in their classes.

All of them, after all, are “ordinary people”. But they’re also people who know what they’re talking about. And who knows, they might even tell us – as viewers, listeners and, of course, fellow voters – something we don’t already know.

Originally published at https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/general-election-interview-voters-street-b2554535.html