Recently, I attended a presentation put on by a television network to promote a show that would be going in syndication on one of its channels. Everyone who attended received a t-shirt and a glossy booklet touting a new demographic study that would compare the characters to Americans nowadays.
The results were really interesting. They had some fine-grained descriptions of different categories of people, how they live, and what their concerns are. I really wanted to write about this! And so, when it was time for questions, I raised my hand and asked if there was a data appendix that I could have.
“Well, no, because you wouldn’t understand it,” the panelist replied. She must have noticed my arched eyebrows, because she immediately added, “It’s not really in a form to distribute because we had to do a lot of massaging of the data to come up with the categories.”
In other words, the whole thing was fiction. The network’s promotion team wanted to come up with something provocative to show advertising agencies, so they more or less made some rather ordinary surveys into some really amazing, unreliable stories that were lovely to hear about but that had no bearing on reality.
This happens a lot, it seems. People hear the stories and think there is substance to them. They use the stories to convince themselves of How Things Are, even though they are ignoring the truth.
They are inventing what they want to hear, or what they think their audience wants to hear, and there’s nothing to it. The panelists misused statistics, and so I couldn’t write about their study – at least not directly.
