She doesn’t know Irv is Jewish

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis.—The Achilles heel of the polling industry was exposed, once again, in a recent revelation that British young people are not, after all, flocking to the churches, chapels, synagogues and mosques of England. The kids are, in fact, just as agnostic, atheist and apostate as ever they’ve been.

The press erroneously trumpeted this youthful explosion of religiosity because its source was an “opt-in” survey. In this format, you’re more likely to take part in the survey if you care emotionally about the survey’s particular topic. If you don’t feel one way or the other, you hang up the phone. The result is that the opt-in survey, skewed toward the passionate, has become a sounding board for single-issue zealots, political activists and money-grubbing
“influencers.”

Actually, I was an unwitting visionary of opt-in polling.

One day, in my freshman year, I found in my mailbox a mimeographed message, sent by the student manager of WRCR, the college’s radio station. It announced creation of a weekly pop-music Top Forty unique to the student body of Rockford College. It provided a form to list my three favorite current tunes and return the slip to WRCR. Since I didn’t have a radio in my room, my first impulse was to drop this entreaty into the nearest trash receptacle. However, I hesitated when I noticed that the trash can was heaped with copies of the very same survey.

I had an idea.

From the rubbish, I gathered a fistful of WRCR Top Forty surveys and took them back to my dorm. Using several different pens in various ink colors and altering my handwriting, I filled out every form with the same song, “My Melancholy Baby,” composed in 1912—when it was a huge hit—by Ernie Burnett with lyrics by George A. Norton.

Later that day, as I was stuffing the ballot box outside the radio station’s door, I encountered the manager. I forget his name but let’s call him Murray. Examining the votes I’d fabricated, Murray was puzzled by the victory of a 46-year-old relict of Tin Pan Alley. He suspected me not of forging the ballots but of waging a campaign among the student body in favor of “Melancholy Baby.” I went along with Murray’s supposition. As we talked, Murray confessed that my batch of votes more than doubled the total cast for every other pop hit. Ruefully, Murray realized the futility of choosing a Top Forty from an electorate in which less than forty votes for one song represents a landslide. I offered him my copy of an album, “Jump for Joy,” with Jim Kweskin’s infectious cover of George Norton’s classic tune. Murray wisely demurred, deeming it inappropriate to the station’s format.

Although, of course, the opt-in concept predates my WRCR sabotage, it has attained virality in the social media era. All those discarded ballots I saved from the Rockford College trash are the equivalent of clicks on Instagram or TikTok.

When, ironically, I made “Melancholy Baby” Number One with a bullet, Murray appreciated the absurdity behind my mischief. We parted as amiable co-conspirators. That was then. Nowadays, a vast American subspecies is addicted to tiny psychotropic touch screens. This humor-challenged demographic is incapable of distinguishing Waiting for Godot from a re-run of “Three’s Company.” Video junkies who gaze into this flickering void—without time to think before the next fix—opt in to ideas and choices unaware that they’ve opted in to anything.

For a while, long after college, I was a public relations flack for an opinion research company. In my efforts to get my clients mentioned in the news, I urged them to come up with survey results that were dramatic, shocking. Headline-grabbers! This was hard. Typical of most polling, the results they published were stuff anyone could figure out without need of a survey. Most polls end up confirming the already obvious. They’re boring. They’re not news.

This is why opt-in surveys are catnip to tabloids. They bear misinformation that, eventually, has to be retracted. But, in the meantime, it’s man-bites-dog. It grabs headlines, spreads across media and becomes, for a lucrative while, gospel.

Opt-in is not, actually, the deepest rabbit hole into which news editors and producers can’t resist plunging. They regularly dispatch their minions to test the public mood in “man-on-the-street” encounters. The New York Times, for example, makes periodic visits to a California suburb that I’ve come to think of as Moron Valley. The reporter stuck with this beat talks to a half-dozen white people and, usually, one token Latino, to read the pulse of heartland Americans on significant issues of the day. Inevitably, these snippets of vaguely informed commentary “balance” between the preordained pros and cons of the issue, conveying the illusion that every idea on God’s earth is a fifty-fifty proposition.

The more entertaining man-on-the-street discourses are visual. They involve a TV reporter—ideally blonde and perky—snagging random strangers and posing the sort of questions that wouldn’t strain the intellect of a gerbil.

For example …

Amber (the reporter): “Excuse me, sir. May I ask you a question?”

Man on the street (MOTS): “Who, me? What? Am I on TV?”

Amber: “Yes, I’m Amber Du Bois from WRCR. May I ask—”

MOTS: “Oh, yeah, sure. I guess. Hiya, Mom!”

Amber: “Sir, our viewers want to know. How do you feel about motherhood?”

MOTS: “What? Mother Hood. Like, Mrs. Hood? Who’s that?”

Amber: “No, sir. I’m asking about the institution of motherhood.”

MOTS: “There’s an institution? Is it around here?

Amber: “Sir, please. Just tell me how you feel about your mother?”
MOTS: “Oh, my mother? Geez, um, well, I guess … I mean, y’know, Mom? I mean, like, y’know. My mother, well, she’s great. I, like, love ’er. Hey, if it weren’t for, like, mothers, who would be, I mean, how would anyone … y’know?”

Amber: “Yeah, I know.” (Edging the man out of the frame) “Thank you, sir.”

Irv (the cameraman): “Great, Amber. I guess that’s a wrap.”

Amber: “No, Irv. We’re journalists. We need to dig deeper. We need balance!”

Irv: “What? We gotta find somebody who’s against motherhood.”

Amber: “The truth is out there … ”

(An hour, and sixteen “interviews” later)

Amber: “Miss, our viewers want to know, how you feel about motherhood?”

Teenage-girl-on-the-street (TGOTS): “My mother! That (expletive) bitch. I hate her. I hate her guts, I hate her rules, I hate her clothes, I hate her (expletive) meat loaf! She’s the (expletive) Antichrist. I’d like to kill her, and kill every mother on our block. And I hate apple pie, too. And baseball! And Cracker Jacks! And you can take every hot dog in America and shove it up my mother’s (expletive).”

Amber: “Well, that’s certainly—”

TGOTS: (Just before storming off) “And another thing! The Holocaust? It never happened. It’s a load of crap made up by the (expletive) Elders of Zion.”

Irv: (Catching his breath). “Well, that’s definitely a keeper, Amber. Whaddya say we get this film back in time for the five o’clock.”

Amber: “Just a minute. Irv. Didn’t you hear? She denied the Holocaust.”

Irv: “Doesn’t matter, Amber. It came at the end. We can edit it out.”
Amber: “Don’t be (expletive) stupid, Irv. This is a big story. We have evidence now, on tape, that America’s youth are steeped in antisemitism.”

Irv: “C’mon, Amber, it’s just one kid, pissed off at the world. We don’t have to flog this dead horse.”

Amber: “Oh, yes, we do. We’re journalists. We leave no nag unflogged. Now, Irv, look sharp. We gotta find a Jew. Is that one? Hey, better yet, let’s head over to 47th Street and snag us a rabbi!”