The relationship between pollsters and the media is becoming increasingly fuzzy. It used to be that pollsters polled the public and papers published the results. Politicians questioned the findings and everyone moved on to the next survey. Times were simpler when the polls were the story. Now its the pollsters themselves in the spotlight.

One can credit this turn of events to the increasing numbers of poll analysts – the Nate Silvers and the Mark Blumenthals of this world. The former runs FiveThirtyEight.com, which just recently signed a content-sharing deal with the New York Times, while the latter runs Pollster.com, acquired last week by online news site The Huffington Post.

Pollsters are fast becoming as much of a talking point as the subjects they investigate, but its not clear that all welcome the increasing scrutiny they find themselves under. Del Ali is a case in point. His firm, Research 2000 has been accused of fabricating polls based on a statistical analysis of results – charges he dismisses as “pure lies”. Whether they are or not, it can’t be good for business.

Then we have veteran pollster John Zogby, who this week attempted to turn the tables on FiveThirtyEight’s Silver with his ‘Note to Nate’, an open letter published in the Huffington Post that was a cocktail of fatherly advice that often crossed the line into condescension and frustration with things that Silver has written about Zogby in the past (He once called Zogby ‘the worst pollster in the world’).

“You take other people’s polls,” Zogby said to Silver, “compare records for predictions, add in some purely arbitrary (and not transparent) weights, then make your own predictions and rankings.

“To date you have many fans. But the real scrutiny is just beginning and some fans are ephemeral.”

Silver, though, was clearly in no mood for a drawn out debate, and you can read his response here.

Most intriguing in all this is Zogby’s reasons for writing the letter. Perhaps it stems from a piece written by Silver last year when the blogger called Zogby International’s online polls “error prone” before deciding that: “These internet polls, simply put, are not scientific and should not be published by any legitimate news organisation.”

Of course, the NY Times deal puts Silver in the ascendent, so is Zogby simply looking to keep the analyst’s feet on the ground?

Zogby rounds up his letter by reminding Silver that the blogger is “a statistician – a very good one – but you are not a pollster” before advising him to carry out some polls of his own to learn how the rest of the industry does it. The underlying tone is that of an old lion stamping its authority on the young cubs.

But a pollster should know better than anyone that you don’t need to be an expert at something to have an opinion on it. There would, after all, be fewer qualified respondents and fewer opinion polls to analyse if that was the case.