While on the Daily Telegraph website, printing off Niall Ferguson’s Sunday Op-Ed, a small pop-up appeared on my screen. Not earth-shattering news I grant you. But it was the nature of the Telegraph-supported pop-up that surprised me. It was a short two-question survey, asking the following:
Which country do you live in?
Is this the country where you were born?
I answered, and the pop-up professed its gratitude, and vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Now, what possibly was the point of this pop-up? What possible marketing or political value would this collated data offer? Being the Telegraph, I wondered if it was some point on immigration, but what is the point of extrapolating information provided by Torygraph readers? White: check; English: Check; Own a house larger than a petrol station: Check.
As with most surveys, polls, and focus groups, they tell you very little. And yet, as is the fashion of the day, they make the alchemists who make them, a bloody fortune.
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In my opinion it is just soundings for a political party that will know the results before the very public that answered the poll do.
I must not tell you how independent the media are.
Rupert Murdoch showed the “independence” of his Sun newspaper today - Front Page concerning Heather Mills and Paul McCartney. A monstrous ‘character assassination’ which is a media disgrace.
There is a dangerous ‘owner/reader deficit’ - especially with the Murdoch Press ie a huge gap between what the reader wants to read, and what the owner wants read.
The trouble is we’re so stupid in this country, we don’t know what’s being done to us.
In fact, the late great John Lennon nicely summed up the Sun reader, in “Working Class Hero” (1970) :
“Keep you doped with religion & sex & TV
And you think you’re so clever & classless & free
But you’re still fuckin’ peasants as far as I can see.”
Richard,
I hadn’t heard the Lennon quote since I was at Uni, thanks again for sharing it. And you’re right in your earlier quote also - there is a media/reader imbalance, but, people still buy Murdoch’s rags. I always get annoyed when I pick up the Times, that I actually quite enjoy some of the columns – I feel somewhat dirty! Kaletski, the economist is good, and I like Giles Coren’s restaurant reviews.
The Editorial should come with a health warning. As for the Sun, well that’s not worthy of comment.
Jose,
You could be right. Maybe the Survey people will sell the data to some political party. I shouldn’t encourage them with my indulgence, I know, but I never heard that curiosity killed the tyger….
Curiosity always helped the tyger feed LOL.