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“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the pollsters”
Lawyers are not our problem, since Shakespeare’s Dick the Butcher is an evil archetype. The trite punching bag of “mainstream media” is not our problem, mostly because there really is no longer any mainstream among the oceanic wetlands of infotainment culture.
Our problem is the trivialization of our news business. And I say news business because it is the only private industry with a public mandate; namely, to sustain an informed electorate within a functional government. There is a reason for the right of a free press being included in the First Amendment of the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights, sandwiched right in between “the freedom of speech” and “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Polling is essentially market research, a client-centered endeavor to figure out the most efficient ways to market products and services to consumers. But polling has become the favored sourcing for stories by a lazy news business producing more narratives than genuine news reporting. Among the building blocks of journalistic discipline, the “five W’s and an H” (who, what, when, where, why and how), what passes for news reporting on what remains of the civic landscape is “What are the odds, what’s the score and who’s winning?”