Opinion poll reporting: The Times does it best, the Daily Mirror the worst

It’s not been a great month for newspapers reporting their own voting intention opinion polls. Despite the concept of newspapers accurately reporting their own polls – i.e. a story that they’ve paid for and been given the full details of – being a fairly basic standard to aim for, we’ve had such low lights as the skewed graph in the Daily Mirror along with its over-hyped language and the Sunday Times so twisting the findings of its own poll you’d have thought there must have been two. Not to forget the attack in The Telegraph attack on that dodgy process of weighting poll numbers; you know, that questionable approach which, er…, every poll commissioned by The Telegraph also does.

As it’s the end of the month, it’s also time for my latest scores on how newspapers have been doing. As explained at the start of the year, each time a newspaper reports an opinion poll that it has commissioned with national party ratings, the report gets scored out of 30 against a set of basic criteria.

Here then are the average scores so far this year:

The Times: 28
Sunday Mirror: 25
The Independent: 20
The Guardian: 15
News of the World: 15
Daily Express: 14
The Sun: 14
Mail on Sunday: 12
Daily Telegraph: 10
Independent on Sunday: 10
Metro: 8
Sunday Telegraph: 8
Sunday Times: 8
Daily Mirror: 0

People: data not available

No great surprises that the Mirror has come in bottom of the list given the stories linked to above, but it’s notable that of the four with scores in single figures two are broadsheets. Good quality reporting of your own stories isn’t something that the broadsheets consistently beat the tabloids at by any means.