By Chris Justice

Quinnipiac University journalism professor Paul Janensch was right when he recently stated this in The Connecticut Post Online: “Polls can tell us what voters are thinking and who is ahead at a specific time. But polls should not be considered prophetic.” But why do so many journalists ignore this reality?

Polls raise more questions than answers. I hear the echoes now around water coolers throughout the country: “Were you polled?” “Who? Me? I’ve never been polled.” So who was actually polled? And when were they polled? What was the question? What exactly is a “margin of error”? Which political organizations fund this pollster?

Polls are useful when identifying trends in public opinion, but are damaging when they become news stories themselves. They promote instant debate ripe for sound bytes, but rarely spur thoughtful, critical analyses. As snapshots of accuracy, they are numbingly inaccurate, create more confusion than clarity, disagree with each other constantly, and direct more attention upon the pollster than the information they solicit.

Answers are moot with polls and pollsters, as John Zogby demonstrated during a recent interview with Jon Stewart. Politicians may need polls, but journalists should avoid them, especially in an era of eroding trust in our news agencies. When so much information is under suspicion, journalists must do a better job of scrutinizing the most suspicious.

I prefer people to polls. Journalists should report people’s stories and not the impersonal, mercurial speculations produced by the American polling monolith. Journalists should avoid using polling information in their leads. Polls are predictive, not prophetic. They don’t warrant the attention journalists give them.

Chris Justice is the Director of Expository Writing at The University of Baltimore.

—Jillian Burt

RATS

“In New York City, as in all great seaports, rats abound. One is occasionally in their presence without being aware of it. In the whole city relatively few blocks are entirely free of them. They have greatly diminished in the last twenty-five years, but there still are millions here; some authorities believe that in the five boroughs there is a rat for every human being.”
Joseph Mitchell. story from 1944

The Modern Library edition of Joseph Mitchell’s The Bottom of the Harbour is small enough to carry around as if it were a pocket bible. I treat it as if it were one. Joseph Mitchell was a creature running around the same kind of neighbourhoods as rats. He could be found in waterways, back alleys, saloons, flophouses. But, unlike the brown rat which was a vicious vandal, going on destructive rampages and soiling and chewing on things it never intends to eat, Joseph Mitchell’s gaze and attention was reverent. Luc Sante, who has covered the same kind of waterfronts in more recent times called Mitchell’s writing “clear and strong and rich,” writing in the New Republic that he possessed a quality “too seldom found in most writing of any sort: it is unreservedly generous.”

There are entertaining analogies in Joseph Mitchell’s story about the rats of New York: “They live to be three or four years old, although now and then one may live somewhat longer; a rat at four is older than a man at ninety.” He quoted an exterminator who said “Rats that survive to the age of four are the wisest and the most cynical beasts on earth.” Mitchell has a sense of inner life of a rat: “The rats of New York are quicker-witted than those on farms, and they can outthink any man who has not made a study of their habits. Even so, they spend most of their lives in a state of extreme anxiety, the black rats dreading the brown and both species dreading human beings. Away from their nests, they are usually on the edge of hysteria.”

Joseph Mitchell arrived in New York on Friday, October 25, 1929, the day of the stock market crash that eased in the Great Depression. He’s best known for “Talk of the Town” pieces for the New Yorker, that gathered up portraits of the city, but the profile in the Everyman Library’s collection of his journalism says that his first job was as “a kind of bottom-depths apprentice crime reporter at Police Headquarters for The World”. He was from North Carolina and frequently returned to spend months at a time in the swamplands looking for wildflowers and woodpeckers and hawks. “Once, deep in the swamp, looking through binoculars, he watched for an hour or so as a pileated woodpecker tore the bark off the upper trunk and limbs of a tall old dead blackgum tree, and he says he considers this the most spectacular event he has ever witnessed.”

WILD ANIMALS IN THE BRONX

Margaret Mittelbach and David Crewdson are nature writers reporting to the city desk. For the New York Times they cover wild animals in urban settings. In 2002 they wrote about an expedition they made through the Bronx.

Along with typical urban fauna like pigeons, squirrels and sparrows, the Bronx is visited by coyotes, wild turkeys, deer and the occasional bald eagle. In fact, the Bronx is so crowded with furred, feathered and finned species that the New York City Parks and Recreation Department posts a full-time wildlife manager there. Earlier this year, we had vaguely considered taking a trip to a wildlife hot spot like the Cloud Forest of Costa Rica. But when we learned about the Bronx’s abundance of wildlife, we decided to save our money. A quick phone call to the Parks Department led us to David Künstler, the Bronx wildlife manager, who offered to guide us on a Bronx safari....As we neared the trail head, an Eastern cottontail rabbit hopped out of the brush and tried to hide from us in a clump of ferns. Its fur was pale brown and its ears were still rather stubby, suggesting it was a juvenile. Suddenly, we were O.K. with not having seen a coyote, which might have wanted to eat this rabbit. Though we hadn’t encountered the fiercest animal that stalks the borough, we were content to end our safari with this furry Bronx native.

New York Times. August 2, 2002

In 2005 they went to Tasmania with the painter Alexis Rockman to hunt for the (alleged) extinct Tasmanian Tiger. It’s a trip deep into the soul as much as across land.

When we first stumbled across a stuffed Tasmanian tiger at the American Museum of Natural History, we were spellbound. This killer, carnivorous marsupial was one of the most extraordinary creatures on the planet. But it hadn’t been seen since the 1930s, and most scientists considered it extinct. Undaunted we headed for the island of Tasmania in search of this elusive beast. Journeying through the island’s intoxicating landscapes, we encountered an array of odd characters: screaming Tasmanian devils, fervent tiger hunters, trickster botanists, and scientists trying to resurrect the tiger through cloning. The result of our travels is Carnivorous Nights, the story of a safari gone slightly unhinged.

Carnivorous Nights website.

HUMANS BEHAVING BADLY AT ZOOS

In Nuremberg in Germany a polar bear cub has been removed from its mother after she began to act strangely after a photographer climbed a fence to take photographs within the man-made cave where the cub had been born.

The intrusion had “probably made Vera feel that she had no secure habitat” for her cub, it added. She had begun to pace endlessly around her enclosure carrying the cub in her jaws.After the cub was separated, vets said it was strong and healthy and had been “brought up very well” by its mother before she became disturbed, the statement said.

AFP. January 9, 2008

The Calcutta Telegraph reports that a chimp began throwing rocks at people after it had been taunted in the Allipore Zoo.

The chimp kept pelting stones at the visitors for half-an-hour since 9.15am, prompting them to run for safety, ducking the missiles all the way. Fortunately, no one was injured in the brick-batting between the distant cousins.

The zoo authorities have deployed keepers around the cages and enclosures to protect the animals, but on Tuesday, they were far outnumbered by the record count of heads — 62,000 — the highest in recent years on Christmas.

“It is only normal that the chimpanzee got irritated when visitors threw stones at it. It may have chucked back a few stones, but we have not received any complaints in this regard,” said zoo director S.K. Chaudhuri. “Such incidents are quite common.”

Calcutta Telegraph.

POLITICAL ANIMALS

New York Times science reporter Natalie Angier wrote a book called The Beauty of the Beastly looking at questionably violent acts and aberrant behaviour by animals that we consider peaceful and warm and stir our hearts—dolphins, for one—and found complimentary things to say about scorpions and snakes and spiders. In a story from January 22 this year she writes about the political manoeuvres of animals.

Among elephants, it is the females who are the born politicians, cultivating robust and lifelong social ties with at least 100 other elephants, a task made easier by their power to communicate infrasonically across miles of savanna floor. Wolves, it seems, leaven their otherwise strongly hierarchical society with occasional displays of populist umbrage, and if a pack leader proves a too-snappish tyrant, subordinate wolves will collude to overthrow the top cur.

Wherever animals must pool their talents and numbers into cohesive social groups, scientists said, the better to protect against predators, defend or enlarge choice real estate or acquire mates, the stage will be set for the appearance of political skills — the ability to please and placate, manipulate and intimidate, trade favors and scratch backs or, better yet, pluck those backs free of botflies and ticks.

Over time, the demands of a social animal’s social life may come to swamp all other selective pressures in the environment, possibly serving as the dominant spur for the evolution of ever-bigger vote-tracking brains. And though we humans may vaguely disapprove of our political impulses and harbor “Fountainhead” fantasies of pulling free in full glory from the nattering tribe, in fact for us and other highly social species there is no turning back. A lone wolf is a weak wolf, a failure, with no chance it will thrive.

ENDANGERED FARM ANIMALS SAVED

The US Fish and Wildlife Services list of endangered animals doesn’t include domesticated animals but Jennifer Cermak wants to save endangered family farm animals.

A fourth-generation farmer with a PhD in pathology and who works by day at a biopharmaceutical company in Cambridge, Cermak owns rare farm animals that are believed to be on the brink of extinction, including Sumatra chickens, Southdown sheep, royal palm turkeys, and a Friesian horse. She is hoping her rare birds and livestock will bring what she calls “agritourism” to her 24-acre property. Her work, experts say, is crucial to keeping alive memories of America’s rural past and protecting food supplies in an era when deadly diseases like Asian bird flu threaten to wipe out segments of the food chain....The animals most in danger of extinction on Cermak’s farm are the Sumatra chickens, black birds with long tails originating from their namesake island in Indonesia. Brought by sailors to the United States centuries ago as souvenirs, fewer than 500 Sumatras exist in the country today, according to the conservancy. Another member of a rare species on the farm is Quincy, a majestic black Friesian horse whose breed was imported to the United States from Holland in the 1600s....Other endangered animals at Berlin Farms include royal palm turkeys, of which around 10,000 exist in the country, and Southdown sheep, which the conservancy recently listed as “recovering,” no longer on the brink of extinction but their numbers still need to be monitored. Cermak’s speckled Sussex chickens are among 1,000 in the United States, according to conservancy figures.

Boston Globe. John Dyer. November 1, 2007

—Jillian Burt

By Rowena Robertson

It’s only just over a week since it happened, but it seems as if Corey Delaney (aka Corey Worthington) has always been there. For the remaining few who don’t know who he is, Corey is the yellow sunglasses-sporting, Melbourne (Australia) teenager who hosted a MySpace-enabled party at his parents’ outer suburbs home last weekend while they were away on holiday. The party was apparently attended by over 500 people, neighbours’ property was supposedly trashed and the police were called in (dog squad, helicopters included). Local and international press leapt on the story.

The media’s response to Corey’s hijinks neatly highlights much that is rotten about the fourth estate – its inordinate focus on the lowest of ‘lowest common denominator’ stories (in a week that saw financial markets take huge tumbles, this was the main story in just about every newspaper in Australia - priorities, anyone?) and its piranha-like desire to devour the (in this case, relatively) innocent.

And indeed, it didn’t take long for the demonization of Corey to start. A Current Affair’s effort stood out, with host Leila McKinnon dripping moral superiority and outrage in an interview with the teenager. Corey, as would any 16-year-old who cares about the judgement of his peers and no-one else, refused to take the blame for the party getting out of hand, and went on to utter the now-famous response to McKinnon’s asking what he would say to other kids thinking of doing the same thing – “get me to do it for you.”

(And some took him at his word. One Sydney promoter offered to pay the teenager up to $10,000 to stage parties, and Corey has apparently also fielded a $2000 offer from a promoter in Queensland.)

Corey’s unabating cockiness fuelled further media coverage and anger. Mid-week, Victoria Police charged him with creating a public nuisance and producing child pornography, which only served to make them look pathetic and desperate, and, with regard to the child pornography charge, just a little bit evil. That charge supposedly stems from some mobile phone footage of semi-clad teenage girls playing Twister at the party. Good luck making that one stick.

The media created ‘Corey Delaney’, and they are to blame for his defiance, the job offers and the trumped up police charges. The best thing Corey can do in the face of his vilification is to continue to milk his fame for all it’s worth.

While the media’s treatment of the teenager has been largely contemptible, it’s almost impossible not to delight in the pop cultural ramifications of his notoriety. The power of the internet to turn an unknown into a cult celebrity in the blink of an eye can be seen in the Corey-related websites and products that have sprung up in the last week. At coreydelaney.com you can buy t-shirts featuring his famous yellow sunglasses; at slapcorey.com you can wallop the boy into next week.

You just know Corey would love it.

About the writer – Rowena Robertson is a freelance writer and the editor of Poster magazine (Australia).

—Jillian Burt

Last year Craigslist founder Craig Newmark placed a camera that allowed thousands of people, collaboratively controlling it online, to capture images of birds from the deck of his home on the edge of the Sutro Forest in San Francisco. It was project developed by Ken Goldberg, now the Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media and Texas A & M University. It’s a project that’s a metaphor for all of his double-edged art/science projects, the tools are only valuable when it’s possible to observe and understand how people use them in their natural habitats. The Berkeley Center for New Media has just announced an endowment of $1.6million from Craigslist, matched by $1.5 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for a total of $3.1 million. It will support research, symposia and lectures. Craigslist and the Center for New Media share “...interests in research areas such as privacy, reputation, trust, access and new ways to encourage socially constructive actions,” said Goldberg. The Berkeley Alumni magazine said “The Center for New Media is less concerned with whiz-bang technologies than with old values—truth, depth, reliablitity, authenticity, aesthetics, and public service.”

Goldberg’s telerobotic art projects created around his research with the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research School at Berkeley were in the realm of what he termed “telepistemology”, the study of ways of knowing, and the validity of what we know, if that knowledge is gained at a distance, through the internet. He encourages what he calls “the resumption of disbelief,” being skeptical of what we find on the internet. His Dislocation of Intimacy project wondered if all that we discover about the world through the internet, which seems like everything, might be nothing more than the shadows on the walls seen by the prisoners in Plato’s cave parable. He combined this with wondering about a place for genuine mystery and wonder in this world, with a mechanism that was a telerobotic version of Duchamp’s hidden noise in ball of twine project. Whether to dismantle something to find out how it works or accept the mystery is a crucial question in today’s world.

All of the telerobotic projects were available to anyone, anywhere online, and the opening up of university research to the world is part of an going mission. There’s a Los Angeles Times article posted on the Berkeley Center for New Media’s website that looks at the phenomenon of university lectures delivered through i-Tunes as free podcasts.

By making hundreds of lectures from elite academic institutions available online for free, Apple is reinvigorating the minds of people who have been estranged from the world of ideas.

For several years universities have posted recorded lectures on their internal websites, giving students a chance to brush up on their classes or catch ones they missed.

But 28 colleges and universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford and Yale, now post select courses without charge at iTunes.

The universities want to promote themselves to parents and prospective students, as well as strengthen ties with alumni. Some also see their mission as sharing the ivory tower’s intellectual riches with the rest of the world.

“It was something we couldn’t easily do before the digital age,” UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof said.

Michelle Quinn. LA Times. November 24, 2007

—Jillian Burt

By James Klurfeld
Newsday (MCT)

This already has been one of the most interesting and unpredictable presidential election campaigns in decades.

I wish I could say it’s been a stellar performance by the press, but I can’t. The only good thing on that count is that voters aren’t letting what we say influence their decisions. In fact, the opposite might be true. How delightful.

We buried Sen. John McCain months ago - well before any votes had been taken - because his campaign organization was in a mess. We, the collective media, were ready to anoint Sen. Barack Obama as the nominee Tuesday afternoon - before any New Hampshire votes had been counted.

What’s going on here? A few thoughts:

The press is always looking for what’s new and different and makes a good story. We help create expectations; when the expectations aren’t met or they’re exceeded, that’s news. It’s just not compelling to say: It doesn’t mean much that Barack Obama unexpectedly won the Iowa caucuses last night because Iowa is an unrepresentative state.

With the advent of cable television and the Internet, there’s a surfeit of opinion and interpretive reporting over just straight reporting. I sometimes feel as if we are jumping to conclusions. For example, following Iowa dozens of pieces were written about how “change” would be the defining element of this campaign. That may or may not be true, but in New Hampshire Tuesday the experienced candidates, McCain and Sen. Hillary Clinton, prevailed. The point is that we shouldn’t come to such broad conclusions about the mood of the electorate based on the voting of two small states and before a whole lot of other voters have truly focused on the campaign.

We tend to make too much of polls. Polls can be helpful in showing trends, but they are snapshots of a point in time, not predictors of what’s going to happen. Monday evening I spoke to any number of colleagues in New Hampshire who had seen the latest polls showing McCain and Obama well ahead. Obama was said by some polls to have a 10-point-plus margin over Clinton. The Republican polls turned out to be fairly representative of what happened, but not the Democratic ones.

Part of the problem is that as good as polling models are, they’re based on assumptions of who is going to vote. When a lot of young voters turned out in Iowa for Obama, contrary to the assumptions in prior polls, the results turned out to be surprising. In New Hampshire, more women voted for Clinton than was expected. In that sense, the best polling data are usually the exit polls of people who actually voted. But, even then, we’re assuming voters are honestly answering questions about why they voted, as opposed to saying what they think they are expected to say. I’m not saying polls don’t have value, just that their value must be kept in perspective.

Trying to gauge candidates’ performances on election night based on the types of crowds they are drawing is a very dangerous game. In his classic book “The Making of a President 1960” (still a thoroughly worthwhile read), Theodore White devoted an entire section to how deceptive big, enthusiastic crowds could be. He admits that in the closings weeks of the campaign, he believed John F. Kennedy was headed to a smashing victory based on the exuberance of the crowds. The election, of course, turned out to be a squeaker. The point, said White, is that a myriad of larger forces was at work. What he observed tended to overwhelm his judgment, White said.

How and why Americans vote as they do is complex and not always easy to discern. And how and why citizens vote as they do doesn’t always fit into the demands of how the news media operate. On Feb. 5 there will be 22 primary contests, and after that evening more than 60 percent of the delegates will have been chosen. Hold the analyses. Let the voters vote.

___

ABOUT THE WRITER
James Klurfeld is a professor of journalism at Stony Brook University.

—James Klurfeld

Pakistan Tops List of Journalists Killed in 2007

In 2002 Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was murdered in Pakistan. His widow, Mariane, also a journalist, wrote a book about her search for him that was adapted into a movie that was released in 2007. “I don’t know if I would have had the strength to do what she did,” Angelina Jolie, who plays Mariane Pearl, told Voice of America, “and when I first saw her interviews and the way she responded to what happened to her husband ...and she was able to go on days later and say ‘ten other people died this month and they were all Pakistani and they are suffering as much as we are...’ I could not, when I first heard that, understand how she was able to come to that so quickly; and having gotten to know her and understand where that is coming from and the importance of having dialog and trying to go that higher ground to find solutions - I have learned that and it is a big lesson.”

Journalists are still dying in Pakistan. Several days after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto the South Asia Free Media Association reported that seven journalists had been killed in Pakistan in 2007, six in Sri Lanka, and five in Afghanistan. “The Pakistani journalists killed were - Mehboob Khan, a freelancer, Noor Hakim Khan of Daily Pakistan, Javed Khan of Markaz and DM Digital TV, Muhammad Arif of ARY One World TV, Zubair Ahmed Mujahid of Jang, Nisar Ahmed Solangi who worked for a Sindhi daily, and Syed Kamil Mashadi, who worked with a private TV channel.”

For security reasons Angelina Jolie’s scenes were shot in India but Dan Futterman, who played Daniel Pearl, went to Pakistan and filmed his scenes in Karachi, in the actual locations where Pearl had been living and researching his stories. “To be there and get a sense of Urdu being spoken on the street, the sort of incredible chaos - both in good and bad ways of that city ...it is an amazing place, teeming with 14 million people in greater Karachi, and you get the sense of sort of bursting at the seams,” he told Voice of America. “I don’t think you could get that anywhere else. It was incredibly important to the texture and the feel of the movie to be shooting actually where things happened.”

“The Pakistani detective who solved the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl has joined the probe into the killing of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto,” Agence France Presse reports officials saying. Zubair Mahmood, a Pakistani detective, is portrayed in the movie as Captain. He’s joined the British detectives from Scotland Yard investigating the assassination. In November of 2006 the Christian Scientist Monitor interviewed him when the movie was being shot.

He risked his life and reputation.On the one hand, the current attention makes Mr. Mahmood proud. But five years later, he still has concerns about how the film will be received here. “I did something good and have recognition for that. But it brings a threat to me; it compromises my security,” he says. “There are so many who don’t like me, who think I’m a traitor - because I arrested one of their good friends.” But in the spirit of the film, Mahmood says he won’t be swayed by fear. Instead, he hopes that in highlighting the efforts of his investigative team, the film can create a positive impression of Pakistan. “The movie will bring a good name to my country in a way.”

David Montero. Christian Science Monitor. November 8, 2006

A Journalist In The Bhutto Dynasty

On November 14 last year the Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece by Benazir Bhutto’s niece. “We Pakistanis live in uncertain times. Emergency rule has been imposed for the 13th time in our short 60-year history,” Fatima Bhutto wrote. “Thousands of lawyers have been arrested, some charged with sedition and treason; the chief justice has been deposed; and a draconian media law—shutting down all private news channels—has been drafted.”

“Fatima Bhutto, the daughter of Benazir’s late brother Murtaza, is a poet and politician who became a harsh critic of her aunt. But after her death, Fatima issued a public call for calm in the family,” reported the Associated Press, which quoted from a piece she’d written for The News in Pakistan. “I never agreed with her politics. I never did. I never agreed with those she kept around her, the political opportunists, hangers-on, them. They repulse me. I never agreed with her version of events. Never. But in death, in death perhaps there is a moment to call for calm. To say, enough. We have had enough. We cannot, and we will not, take anymore madness.”

In an opinion piece published in the Telegraph in London, Jemima Khan, ex-wife of former Pakistan Cricket Captain Imran Khan, who has his own political party in Pakistan, suggested Fatima as a future leader.

The justification for the selection of Benazir’s son as chairman was that only a Bhutto could provide unity within the party. If so, then why not 25-year-old Fatima Bhutto, who is arguably more qualified for the job than her teenage Facebooking cousin? If everything’s in a name, Fatima need not have changed hers in order to inherit. Brought up in Pakistan, unlike Bilawal, and a native speaker, she is an established writer and political commentator. At least she has some work experience. Aunt Benazir’s first-ever job was prime minister of a 160-million-strong nation.

It helps, in a lookist society, that she’s also as beautiful as her aunt - a young Salma Hayek lookalike - and has similar tragic appeal: orphaned, like most Bhuttos, as a result of a political assassination. Fatima is also politicised and outspoken. Too much so. She repeatedly accused her aunt of being complicit in the murder of her father and savagely opposed Zardari. That ruled her out.

The real reason Fatima is my favourite Bhutto, though, is that she has the sense to realise that a few good articles and the right surname don’t qualify her for leadership. Unlike others in the family, she rejects the notion that political power is her birthright: “I don’t think my name qualifies me or makes me the best person.”

—Jillian Burt