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Reporting PO poll results has become an integral part of the news coverage of election campaigns. A content analysis of the 1980 presidential election news in 50 newspapers is used to examine the salience of the PO poll as a news event compared with other news events of the campaign. Polls made up 15% of all the news events of the 1980 campaign, but they generated only 9.9% of the news stories of the campaign. Horse-race polls, those that reported who was ahead & who was behind, constituted nearly 60% of all poll events. During the whole election campaign, news stories about polls were generally less likely to be run & less likely to receive prominent play than other campaign stories. Even during the last two weeks of the campaign, although use of horse-race polls by editors increased, it did not increase as much as use of other campaign stories. Thus, while PO polls were an important part of the 1980 election news coverage, they were by no means dominant; other events received equal or better coverage. 4 Tables, 21 References. Modified AA.