Sociologist Herbert Gans says the news media should do a better job noting that “polls are answers to questions rather than opinions,” and that not all opinions have the same intensity — or the same impact.

“Rather than the public being eclipsed or forgotten, there are instead too many publics.”

Sociologist Herbert Gans argues it’s time for political reporting to stop focusing solely on the elites and experiment with new models for bottom-up journalism.

The McLuhan manner was to appear anywhere he found interesting, which is to say all over the place, and that willingness was as influential as his ideas.