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The editorial whores at the Plain Dealer have defiled themselves again. I hope the latest venal excuse for a news story doesn't kill anyone, but I fear it could.
Last Sunday's Plain Dealer made a front-page (albeit below the fold) story of a very recent national telephone survey. The article, "Americans want U.S. to attack, poll shows," says that 85% of surveyed Americans, according to the poll taken merely on the second and third days after the terrorist attacks on the east coast, support some kind of military action against the parties responsible for organizing it.
Fewer and fewer supported military action as the pollsters offered more and more qualifying conditions. When the question was rephrased as "...even if it means many thousands of innocent civilians may be killed?" still 58% of those surveyed said yes.
Running the story at all was a bit irresponsible to begin with, even though everybody seems to be doing it. The polling organization called people at home, some just two days after an unprecedented surprise attack on civilians in New York, when it was widely speculated that up to 50,000 had died. They asked leading questions that tapped right into the nearly universal anger. Given the circumstances, I'm astonished the numbers weren't even higher!
Polls-as-news, in any case, is bad reporting even when done well. If all you want out of a newspaper is for it to reflect its own readers' prejudices and emotions, you can get that kind of information from the guys at the corner bar. The news media are supposed to inform, but there's nothing informative about echo-chamber journalism.
Worse, professional observers of journalism say that polls-as-news tend to push opinions towards those of the current majority. Minnesota Daily Online wrote, for example, (emphasis mine)
If an individual who starts out the day feeling vaguely supportive of a new transit program is barraged by information telling her more than 75 percent of the state's population is strongly opposed, she will likely become unsure of the validity of her opinion, despite the lack of any real information disproving her beliefs.
So, running polls as front-page news so early in a time of crisis can help influence public opinion to lock in on initial impressions, which are likely the least rational.
To recap: the Plain Dealer starts with a no-news story. They load it with inputs designed to produce a hawkish response, and title the results with a further hawkish spin. They put it on the front page while stashing the (astonishingly relevant) life story of number-one suspect Osama bin Laden in the inside.
Then the editors further buried, in one short paragraph of a sidebar of a sidebar, some information on support given to bin Laden long ago by our CIA, when the mujahadeen were the good guys and the USSR was the bad guys. While that doesn't make bin Laden and his associates out to be heroes now, it's the kind of information likely to make some people consider the attack on Americans a form of "blowback"--an unanticipated long-term consequence of a nominally successful covert operation. In other words, the kind of important detail that might have led some readers to understand how complex geopolitics really is.
I'm not as impressed by that 85% figure as I am by the converse: one out of six Americans, when asked immediately after the event, were against any form of military action against the perpetrators of history's most audacious and tragic attacks on American civilians! Examining the results more closely, one out of five--at a time when fear, shock, and raw anger ruled seemingly every person's thoughts--said they preferred a peaceful solution to mounting an operation that might involve, say, bombing Kabul. And another one-fifth of those interviewed said they weren't sure or couldn't answer the question.
In a culture where any anti-war sentiments can get a person ridiculed ostracized, or labeled disloyal, I find that simply amazing.
The jarring violence of last week's events. The horror of thousands of deaths. Those desperate cell phone calls and the tragically inspiring stories of courageous passengers with nothing to lose crashing a suicide jet short of its target. Still, a very substantial minority want to eliminate terrorist attacks on America without further bloodshed.
I'm terribly, sickly afraid that peace might not be possible. But it says great things about Americans that so many of us want it to be.
This is neither a jerimiad for war nor an apology for peace. The political and moral choices are complex; the enemy is hard to find even if we do know who he is; and it's impossible to know how the alternatives will work out in reality until it's too late to fix a mistake. That is the point. Nobody but God can be sure of the right choice, but the wrong one can destroy nations and kill millions.
Representative democracy reaches the wisest decisions by letting media inform the public and allowing a consensus, or at least a majority, to come about calmly. Perfect rationality isn't going to be possible in this lifetime, but surely we can do better than winding up the masses and taking polls. That's not journalism, it's treating citizens like laboratory mice in a caffeine study.
This is not the time for emotionally driven decision making. Shoddy papers like the Plain Dealer inflame more than they inform.
This highly filtered "news" is designed for what? To produce semi-manufactured groundswell of support for the most aggressive military response? Is that good for business? It should be, because it surely won't get the Plain Dealer that Pulitzer prize they've been saying they want.
"Trivial stories which compelled suspense and interest not only appeared on the front page of the Journal, they dominated it." That was said of William Randolph Hearst's operation of the Journal of New York at the turn of the twentieth century. Hearst's style, which came to be known as "yellow journalism" after the color scheme of the Journal's comic strips, sold millions of papers but is also blamed for pushing America's involvement in what came to be called the Spanish-American War.
The effect on public opinion of running a hawkish poll-as-news story so prominently, so soon after an unprecedented national tragedy, will be impossible to measure accurately. But if the hype and selective reporting result in the wrong action being taken, much more is at stake than the Plain Dealer's ever-sagging circulation numbers.
Keep beating the drum, keep distorting history, keep cherry-picking those easy poll stories so readers can see themselves in the paper. But decades from now, will history see that Pulitzer prize in your hands... or just blood on them?
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