Proofiness - Charles Seife [36]
The poll was a journalistic invention. Most historians say that the first one, at least in the political sphere, was conducted by the Pennsylvanian , a Harrisburg newspaper, in July 1824. A presidential election was a few months away, and the newspaper dispatched a correspondent to neighboring Delaware to see which way the political winds were blowing.33 The answer came back: Andrew Jackson was greatly preferred over his rival, John Quincy Adams. It was a crude and flawed poll, but from this humble start, polling was born. Marketers, keen to find out what consumers think of their advertisements and their products, refined the art of the poll to a high level of sophistication. Politicians, like marketers, use polls to figure out what the public desires and to fine-tune their images accordingly. However, from the very beginning, the journalist was the prime purveyor of polls. He still is. To a journalist, a poll is a powerful mechanism for breaking out of shackles that subtly bind him.
Most journalists are primarily event-gatherers, picking and packaging the choicest and freshest events to present to their audiences. Every time there is a sufficiently interesting or important event of some sort—a plane crash, say, or an earthquake—journalists rush in to relay the story. However, without an event to report, journalists are almost helpless. When there’s no event, almost by definition, there’s no news for them to report. As journalist Walter Lippmann put it in the 1920s:
It may be the act of going into bankruptcy, it may be a fire, a collision, an assault, a riot, an arrest, a denunciation, the introduction of a bill, a speech, a vote, a meeting, the expressed opinion of a well known citizen, an editorial in a newspaper, a sale, a wage-schedule, a price change, the proposal to build a bridge. . . . There must be a manifestation. The course of events must assume a certain definable shape, and until it is in a phase where some aspect is an accomplished fact, news does not separate itself from the ocean of possible truth.
To a journalist, the event is a tyrant. It is the authority that grants him liberty to speak. And this liberty is typically only given for a short amount of time. Unless the event is extraordinarily salacious or deadly or important, the journalist must move on to other topics quickly, as his powers to attract an audience rapidly wane as the event ages. He has a day or two or three to talk about an explosion or child abductions before he must once more hold his tongue, at least until the next event.
To a reporter who’s bubbling with ideas to write about, this can be terribly frustrating. Lots of interesting and important developments happen as a gradual trickle, rather than in a series of discrete, reportable events. However, journalists generally can’t write about broad trends or abstract ideas until they find what is called a “news peg”—a timely event that the reporter can tie, no matter how tenuously, to the subject that he really wants to talk about. For example, a journalist who has a vague hankering to write about his suspicions that airline safety has been getting worse would keep an eye out for a news peg of some sort—any event that might provide a convenient excuse for publishing the story. A high-profile plane crash would be an ideal peg, but other lesser events—perhaps not newsworthy on their own—would also suffice. A near miss would do. So would an incident where a pilot gets fired for showing up on the job drunk. Reports are also good news pegs; the journalist probably wouldn’t have to wait long before the FAA or some other government agency publishes a report or generates a new statistic about transportation that might imbue the piece with timeliness. Failing that, there’s always an anniversary of some disaster or another; if desperate, the reporter can dust off TWA 800 or the Andes plane crash or even the R101 airship disaster to write a piece at the appropriate time. For a news peg need not even be a real event; it can be a fake one.
A real event tends to be