The article deals with the use of public opinion polls in Slovenian journalism. It gives proof of how consolidation of such cultural form (poll as event) in a modern "informative" journalism in the 1990s on the one hand influences the production of news, while on the other the production of poll results corresponds to the phenomenology of journalistic practice, e.g. with its demand for eventfulness, with the production of news - pseudoevents, with the demand for factuality and ritualised argumentation of objectivity by citing. The authoress believes that empirically supposedly incontestable facts of poll results that are equated with the public opinion, may serve as an effective means of legitimising a special particular political vision, since it seems that they express a consensus, which is usually nothing else than a reproduction of the dominant media or political discourse. Public opinion is a result of public discourse on public opinion because opinions andviews measured by the polls do not originate from private experience of the"respondent" but from the discursive culture that "respondents" are part of. By replacing a mediated public discussion by publication of public opinion polls and by reducing of public opinion on final and fixated numerical data, journalism makes formation of arguments and alternative visions impossible. By creating a fiction on "Slovene public" as articulated by opinion polls it conceals cultural and class differences within the society.
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