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More than 2,300 members of the Writers Guild of America, including Spike Lee and Adam McKay, have signed an open letter decrying the actions of Donald Trump’s administration that represent “an unprecedented, authoritarian assault” on free speech.The letter, a combined effort from the WGA East and West branches, cites the US president’s “baseless lawsuits” against news organizations that have “published stories he does not like and leveraged them into payoffs”. It specifically references Paramount’s decision to pay Trump $16m to settle a “meritless lawsuit” about a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. The letter notes that Trump “retaliated against publications reporting factually on the White House and threatened broadcasters’ licenses”, and has repeatedly called for the cancellation of programs that criticize him.Additionally, the letter blasts Republicans in Congress who “collaborated” with the Trump administration to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “in order to silence PBS and NPR”. And it says the FCC, led by Trump-appointed chair Brendan Carr, “openly conditioned its approval of the Skydance-Paramount merger on assurances that CBS would make ‘significant changes’ to the purported ideological viewpoint of its journalism and entertainment programming.“These are un-American attempts to restrict the kinds of stories and jokes that may be told, to silence criticism and dissent,” the letter reads. “We don’t have a king, we have a president. And the president doesn’t get to pick what’s on television, in movie theaters, on stage, on our bookshelves, or in the news.”Signees include Tony Gilroy, David Simon, Mike Schur, Ilana Glazer, Lilly Wachowski, Celine Song, Justin Kuritzkes, Desus Nice, Gillian Flynn, John Waters, Liz Meriwether, Kenneth Lonergan, Alfonso Cuarón, Shawn Ryan and many other prominent names in film and television.The letter, released on Tuesday, calls on elected representatives and industry leaders to “resist this overreach”, as well as their audiences to “fight for a free and democratic future” and “raise their voice”.The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced last Friday that it would shut down after 57 years in operation, following the decision by the Republican-controlled House last month to eliminate $1.1bn in CPB funding over two years, part of a $9bn reduction to public media and foreign aid programs.The corporation, established by Congress in 1967 to ensure educational and cultural programming remained accessible to all Americans, distributed more than $500m annually to PBS, NPR and 1,500 local stations nationwide. Despite the federal grants, stations mostly relied on viewer donations, corporate sponsorships and local government funds to stay afloat.The Trump administration has also filed a lawsuit against three CPB board members who refused to leave their positions after Trump attempted to remove them.“This is certainly not the first time that free speech has come under assault in this country, but free speech remains our right because generation after generation of Americans have dedicated themselves to its protection,” the letter concludes. “Now and always, when writers come under attack, our collective power as a union allows us to fight back. This period in American life will not last forever, and when it’s over the world will remember who had the courage to speak out.” More
The Smithsonian will include Donald Trump’s two impeachments in an updated presentation “in the coming weeks” after references to them were removed, the museum said in a statement Saturday.That statement from the Washington DC museum also denied that the Trump administration pressured the Smithsonian to remove the references to his impeachments during his first presidency.The revelation that Trump was no longer listed among impeached presidents sparked concern that history was being whitewashed to appease the president.“We were not asked by any administration or other government official to remove content from the exhibit” about presidential power limits, the Smithsonian statement said.A museum spokesperson, Phillip Zimmerman, had previously pledged that “a future and updated exhibit will include all impeachments,” but it was not clear when the new exhibit would be installed. The museum on Saturday did not say when in the coming weeks the new exhibit will be ready.A label referring to Trump’s impeachments had been added in 2021 to the National Museum for American History’s exhibit on the American presidency, in a section called “Limits of Presidential Power”. The section includes materials on the impeachment of presidents Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson and the Watergate scandal that helped lead to Richard Nixon’s resignation.“The placard, which was meant to be a temporary addition to a twenty-five year-old exhibition, did not meet the museum’s standards in appearance, location, timeline, and overall presentation,” the statement said. “It was not consistent with other sections in the exhibit and moreover blocked the view of the objects inside its case. For these reasons, we removed the placard.”Trump is the only president to have been impeached twice. In 2019, he was impeached for pushing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden, who would later defeat Trump in the 2020 presidential election. And in 2021, he was impeached for “incitement of insurrection”, a reference to the 6 January 2021 attack aimed at the US Capitol by Trump supporters attempting to halt congressional certification of Biden’s victory over him.The Democratic majority in the House voted each time for impeachment. The Republican-led Senate each time acquitted Trump. More
Late-night hosts discussed the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein scandal and the “spite” behind Donald Trump’s impending tariffs.Seth MeyersOn Late Night, Seth Meyers spoke about the theories circulating over the death of Epstein, spurred on by the alleged missing minute from his jail cell video on the night of his death.He said that Trump is not in the right place to be handling it, as he’s “old” and “tired” and just came back from a golfing vacation in Scotland.While there, he opened a private new golf course, which was on the official White House live stream. “They’re not even pretending any more, there’s no separation,” Meyers said.Trump is “tired from all his golfing and self-enrichment” and was recently seen trying not to fall asleep during a press briefing with Mehmet Oz. “Imagine if Joe Biden did this,” he said.Meyers added that “he can’t hear or understand reporters’ questions any more” before playing footage of him getting confused over a recent question about Russia.Trump has been asked why he cut ties with Epstein and recently said he didn’t want to waste people’s time by going through the details. “Please, my man, waste our time!” Meyers said.He then “dug the hole even deeper” and “made it so much worse” by rambling on about Epstein stealing workers from his spa, which he said was one of the best spas in the world. “Stop talking about the spa – is it your safe word?” Meyers asked.But it’s “not just Trump who keeps digging a hole for himself”, there’s also Dan Bongino, an Epstein-obsessed podcaster who is now the deputy director of the FBI.Despite him claiming that the full, unedited tape would be released, experts have said that while it might be “unclear how much time is missing”, this isn’t the full tape after all.“This whole thing is a crisis of Trump’s making,” he said.Stephen ColbertOn The Late Show, Stephen Colbert reminded viewers that it was the last day of July, which means that the “basket of deplorable tariffs are gonna kick in” the day after.Trump had originally claimed he had made 200 deals ready for 1 August but “on the other hand, no he didn’t”, with just eight in place before the deadline.Colbert said that “his demands are insane” and many of the countries are included “just for spite”.This week also saw him revive the presidential fitness test for American schoolchildren so they could be “as fit as President Trump”. It had originally been retired in 2012 for a switch to a focus on individual health rather than athletic feats.Trump signed the executive order flanked by athletes, including former NFL star Lawrence Taylor, who is a registered sex offender. Colbert called it “a brilliant way to distance yourself from the whole Epstein scandal”.This week also saw lawyer Alan Dershowitz, known for clients such as OJ Simpson, Harvey Weinstein and Trump, make further complaints about how he is shunned while in Martha’s Vineyard.He had previously complained that his politics had made him a social pariah, but now he is suing a vendor who refused to serve him pierogi. He was later seen speaking to a police officer about the incident.“They have bigger crimes to investigate, like someone’s houseguest bringing a domestic chardonnay,” Colbert quipped. More
Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States a second time from what is essentially the beacon of global culture and heritage – Unesco – is depressing but unsurprising given the administration’s lack of respect for art and culture that celebrates the diversity of humanity in all of its fullness. But it is still a grave error of moral leadership that harms the United States’ global standing on free expression, human rights and democracy.Earlier this year, he initiated a takeover of the Kennedy Center’s programming and content, and linked National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants to highly partisan ideological conditions. Meanwhile, the government’s attempts at censorship in schools are all but rewriting American history.Trump has also systematically removed the United States from global obligations connected to health, human rights and the betterment of society. This includes withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN human rights council (UNHRC) and in effect the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).It was only a matter of time before Unesco – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization – came under fire, representing as it does everything the Trump White House rails against. Unesco’s chief was unsurprised, saying that since the last time Trump was in power and pulled the US out of the organization, they had reduced their reliance on US funding significantly and would be carrying on with its mission.Why, then, does this withdrawal matter? Surely it can be chalked up to another strong-arm tactic designed to make headlines and give the administration some more “America First” policies to boast about. Unfortunately, when it comes to culture, it is not that simple.Culture comes under fire when democracy is dying. Russia’s imprisonment of writers, artists and cultural figures who question official narratives about the war on Ukraine; or the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas – these are examples of how culture becomes both a target and a battleground because it represents identity, memory and freedom of thought – the very things authoritarianism seeks to control or erase.What the US administration has dismissed as “woke” is actually Unesco preserving democratic ideals, teaching the world valuable lessons based in history and protecting artistic freedom – all things that autocrats see as a threat to their ability to control the narrative. It is no small irony that the organization’s recognition of Palestine has also been used as an excuse for the withdrawal, when Unesco is one of the leaders of Holocaust education in the world, and Palestine itself is suffering near total cultural obliteration.It would be a grave error for the United States not to recognize that Trump’s disdain for cultural preservation is part of a broader assault on human rights, democracy, free expression and artistic freedom. It is a story repeated across the world and throughout time. It is notable that one of the few countries to also withdraw from Unesco was South Africa, which withdrew in 1955 in protest against Unesco’s stance against apartheid. During this period of isolation, the apartheid government intensified its control over culture and education, seeking to tightly control the narrative in South Africa and globally about its discriminatory policies.There is still time to reverse this decision. PEN America, which defends free expression worldwide and ARC, the Artists at Risk Connection that protects artistic freedom, urge Congress to oppose this latest move to further isolate the United States globally, and ensure that the country continues to fulfill its international human rights obligations. US funders and foundations should also increase support to writers, journalists and media outlets, artists and cultural institutions, and free expression advocates in countries affected by the shutdown of US foreign assistance.By working with Unescoto commemorate sites of apartheid resistance when it rejoined in 1994, South Africa has shown how global engagement can honor truth and build inclusive memory; the United States, by contrast, risks forfeiting that same moral leadership by retreating from the very institution that makes such progress possible.
Liesl Gerntholtz is the managing director of the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Center at PEN America. Julie Trebault is executive director of the Artists at Risk Connection More
Last Thursday, when Stephen Colbert announced on air that CBS had decided to cancel The Late Show, its flagship late-night comedy program, after 33 years in May of next year, I was shocked.For the better part of six years, I have watched every late-night monologue as part of my job at the Guardian (hello, late-night roundup), and though I often grumble about it, The Late Show has become a staple of my media diet and my principle source of news; as a millennial, I haven’t known a television landscape without it. There are many bleaker, deadlier things happening daily in this country, and the field of late-night comedy has been dying slowly for years, but the cancellation of The Late Show, three days after Colbert called out its parent company for settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump, felt especially and pointedly depressing – more a sign of cultural powerlessness and corporate fecklessness in the face of a bully president than the inevitable result of long-shifting tastes.Reporting in the days since the announcement have lent some credence to CBS’s claim that this was “purely a financial decision”. Though The Late Show has led the field of late-night comedy in ratings for years, it only averages about 2.47 million viewers a night. Its ad revenue plummeted after the pandemic; Puck’s Matthew Belloni reported that the show loses $40m for CBS every year. Of the network late-night shows – NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers, The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! – Colbert’s Late Show has the smallest footprint on social media, where Fallon’s celebrity gags still reign supreme. The format of late-night television – a host delivering a topical monologue, house band, celebrity guest interviews – is a living relic of a different time, when a youth-skewing audience would reliably pop on linear television at 11.30pm. The field has been contracting for years, with programs hosted by Samantha Bee, James Corden and Taylor Tomlinson ending without replacement. Ad revenue for the genre as a whole is down 50% from just seven years ago, in the middle of Trump 1.0. It’s long been assumed that the hosts currently in these once-coveted chairs would be the last, their programs expiring when they decided to step down.What’s shocking is that Colbert, who was reportedly set to renegotiate his one-year contract at the end of this season, was not given that time, which just so happens to coincide with a critical window for the intended merger of CBS parent company Paramount with Skydance Media. Three days before the announcement, Colbert called Paramount’s settlement with Trump a “big fat bribe” to incentivize the administration’s approval of this $8bn deal managed by two billionaire families.Regardless of Colbert’s contract timing, it seems the cancellation of The Late Show is a financial decision, just not in the way CBS is framing it. It’s not about the $40m The Late Show is losing per year – a lot of money, to be sure, though a drop in the bucket for the major players here – but the $8bn on the line with this merger. There were presumably other options; Late Night With Seth Meyers dispensed of its house band and musical acts last year to save money. With new billionaire ownership, there could be some business maneuvering, should independent political comedy be a priority. Colbert’s Late Show, a leading critic of Donald Trump on network television, is clearly not; the show may have been a money loser, but in this context, it’s a convenient sacrifice.And though it’s easy to roll one’s eyes at late-night television – I often do – it’s an especially disappointing one, both in the culture at large and in the dwindling 11.35pm time slot. For years, I have argued that the late-night shows have long outstripped their original function as comedy programs. They are satirical, occasionally relevant, sometimes profane, but hardly ever funny, in the traditional sense of making you laugh. Often, they resort to so-called “clapter” – laughter as a polite applause, jokes for agreement rather than laughter – in a deadening anti-Trump feedback loop. With the exception of The Daily Show, a cable program founded for the purpose of political satire, the shows basically serve two functions in the internet era: 1 Generate viral celebrity content as they promote another project, and 2 Comment freely on the news, unbound from the strictures of decorum, tone and supposed “objectivity” that hamstrings so much journalism in the US.The latter was, I’d argue, the most important contribution of late-night television in the Trump era, when the president and his minions exceeded parody, and Colbert was the best at it. Nimble, erudite, self-deprecating but exceptionally well-read, Colbert transformed from extremely successful Fox News satirist to the reverend father of late-night TV: principled, authoritative but hardly ever self-righteous, deeply faithful to the American project, steadfastly believing in the decency of others. (Colbert is a practicing Catholic and die-hard Lord of the Rings fan, facts that sometimes snuck into his monologues.) At times, such old-school values felt insufficient for the moment; the format of late-night comedy as a whole has proven futile, even pathetic, in the face of Donald Trump’s brand of shamelessness, the Maga movement’s ability to turn everything into a joke. But these hosts, and the Daily Show-trained Colbert especially, did something that the rest of news media or the sprawling celebrity and comedian podcast network could not: call bullshit on the administration with the imprimatur of a major television network, and say exactly what they were feeling.That ability proved useful to me, as a viewer, at times when it seemed standard media was incapable of articulating what was happening. During the pandemic, or the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, or on January 6, or when Trump was re-elected, or when Republicans mocked Californians during the devastating LA wildfires earlier this year, late-night television had the freedom to express outrage, and Colbert in particular to express moral injury. The jokes were almost never surprising; they weren’t really even jokes. But it still felt soothing to see someone say them, with corporate backing, at an institution that still carried enough name recognition to, well, merit a “late-night roundup”.Colbert, ultimately, will be fine. He is a skilled comedian whose talents weren’t always well-tapped by the strict format of late-night comedy. Perhaps he will join the legion of comedians with podcasts, speaking directly to fans; perhaps he will release a special. But his absence from late-night television spells doom for the rest of the format, and more importantly for freedom of speech on the big networks. Late-night comedy has been fighting a losing battle for a long time, and The Late Show was never going to out-influence the rising tide of rightwing media, the manosphere or any number of independent shows in a fracturing media landscape. But the fact that he could try, from one of the more famed perches in television, still meant something. More
Thomas Chatterton Williams, a public intellectual of some standing in the US, dislikes the Trumpian right for its erratic authoritarianism. But he dislikes its hysterical leftwing critics too – arguably with more vehemence. He takes great pride in having no truck with tribes, but he does belong to one: like halitosis, as Terry Eagleton quipped, ideology appears to be only what the other person has. Williams may think he is a freethinker above the fray, but he has a creed – and it is liberal complacency.His 2010 debut memoir Losing My Cool was the story of – as the subtitle had it – Love, Literature and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd. Rap, he declared, was not so much a genre as a subculture, seducing young black men into a world of crime. That, apparently, would have been Williams’s fate (when he physically attacks his girlfriend, for instance, hip-hop lyrics shoulder the blame) had it not been for Pappy, his disciplinarian father, who foisted 15,000 books on him.The classics beat crime in the end, and we leave Williams on his happy road to intellectualdom, absorbing Sartre in Parisian cafes. But it wasn’t enough for him to merely present his own story; Williams elected to hold up his life as an example for black Americans. “See, you can be just like me” is the breathless gist of Losing My Cool. It never struck him that he might have had certain class advantages – a father with a PhD in sociology; a mixed-race heritage; an upbringing in white, bourgeois, suburban New Jersey – that make him somewhat unrepresentative as a role model.Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, Williams’s second memoir, published just before the pandemic, served up more hyper-agentic advice. The springboard for these post-racial reflections was the birth of his daughter. Bearing, as babies tend to do, a resemblance to her mother, who is white and French, Williams’s child is blond. It follows that there is an arbitrariness to the whole business of race, from which Williams swiftly emancipates himself. Then comes the counsel: black Americans would do well to follow in his footsteps by “transcending” race themselves. Conceding that this may be an easier proposition for him and his white-passing daughter, he exhorts mixed-race people to “form an avant garde when it comes to rejecting race”.Williams’s grand subject being himself, now we have a third memoir. Summer of Our Discontent takes a caustic look at Black Lives Matter from the lofty vantage point of his Parisian garret. At the outset, he tells us that the self-preening, race-mad identity politics of left-leaning liberals has fostered atomisation and precluded solidarity. As a consequence, the illiberal, unhinged right, now united behind Trump, has stolen a march on them. But from this not unreasonable edifice, Williams throws up a enormous scaffolding of enemies, which comes to encompass anyone and everyone engaging in some form or another of collective action. Ultimately, by the end, it appears that Williams’s beef is not so much with Trump as with his leftwing critics.This is a strange, muddled book. On the one hand, Williams emphasises the primacy of class over race in the US. George Floyd, he says, was not your average African American: he was poor, unemployed, and had a criminal record. Horrific as his killing by a white policeman was, it was unduly racialised by BLM. Fewer than 25 unarmed black civilians are killed by police annually. Most black people will never find themselves in Floyd’s shoes, Williams contends.While class is important for Williams, class politics isn’t. There is only so much that initiatives to lift the poor from poverty can achieve, we are told, because “the fundamental political unit, going back to Aristotle, remains the family”. The left has got it all wrong, obsessing over the “macro level” when real change apparently happens at the individual level.Williams’s strategy is to cherrypick the most ludicrous examples of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to smear the entire left. Sympathy from a few celebrities for the actor Jussie Smollett – who was accused of faking a hate-crime against himself, which he denied – is taken as evidence of the left’s crumbling “moral authority and credibility”. BLM, he claims, was driven by “an ascendant raider class” of middle-class and not always black activists seizing institutional power – such as when a “multi-ethnic mob of junior employees” ousted New York Times opinion editor James Bennet for publishing Senator Tom Cotton’s call to deploy troops against BLM protests.Williams’s other objections appear to be mostly aesthetic. He expends much energy pillorying the performative activism of such BLM “allies” as “the official Twitter account of the wildly popular British children’s cartoon Peppa Pig”, which tweeted a black square in solidarity. Later, visiting BLM-ravaged Portland, he mourns that “a beloved statue of an elk has been toppled”. This in a town with a “well-deserved reputation” for “exquisite gastronomy”. Quelle horreur.He concludes by suggesting that the left and right are just as odious as one another. The storming of the Capitol in 2021, he says, had a mimetic quality, the populist right “aping” the “flamboyant reflex” of the unruly left. With such invidious comparisons, and with such a dim view of collective action, Williams is unable to make the case as to how precisely his homeland is to move towards a post-racial utopia. Excelling in sending up bien-pensant opinion, he has no answers. Fixated on slagging off the left, he has marooned himself on an island of vacuity. So when he articulates a positive vision of the future, all he offers are new age nostrums such as “reinvestment in lived community” and “truth, excellence, plain-old unqualified justice”.His plea for perspective is similarly misplaced. Young black Americans, Williams whinges, have been seduced by the race pessimism of the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates, his more popular nemesis. He enjoins us to look on the bright side: the racial wage gap is closing; black school attainment rates are nearing white levels.Williams’s Panglossian outlook is, I suspect, a form of American parochialism. His homeland, he says, is a “society that is frankly more democratic, multi-ethnic, and egalitarian than any other in recorded history”. The Gini coefficient and Democracy Index beg to differ. There are eminently sensible reasons for race pessimism in America. Segregation and ghettoisation are facts of life. The wage gap between black and white people is still a staggering 21% (in Britain, it’s under 6%). White Americans live three-and-a-half years longer than black Americans on average (black Britons outlive white Britons).Collectively, it was not the complacent optimists (who declared we had never had it so good) but rather the do-gooding pessimists (that demanded change at the dreaded “macro level”) who overthrew slavery and fought for civil rights. Individually, too, pessimism pays. For someone who sets great store by personal agency, Williams will no doubt appreciate Billy Wilder’s melancholy observation – occasioned by losing three relatives at Auschwitz – that “the optimists died in the gas chambers; the pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills”. More
Ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, opinion polls predicted a win for Hillary Clinton. She lost, and the polling industry went through one of its regular spasms of self-criticism and supposed reform. Alas, it did not vote itself entirely out of existence. France and Spain ban the publication of opinion polls in the days leading up to an election, but we should go one better and ban their publication at any time.No doubt it adds much to the gaiety of the British nation to see the Conservative party slip to third or fourth in the polls, but any poll asking who you would vote for if there were a Westminster election tomorrow, held at a time when there almost certainly will not be an election for another four years, is meaningless as a guide to the makeup of the next Parliament.If polls were simply useless that would be no reason to ban them, though. A better reason is that they are actively harmful: a species of misinformation that pollutes the public sphere.One fundamental problem, recognised long ago, is that there is no such thing as “the public”, thought of as a hive mind with a single homogeneous view. To report the results of any poll as “the British public thinks…” is simply a falsehood, except perhaps in the unlikely circumstance that fully 100% of respondents agree on some point. There is, for the same reason, no such thing as “the will of the British people”, a spectre conjured into being only when something very dubious is being proposed.So what is it exactly that opinion polls measure? A random sample, hopefully statistically reliable, of differing and irreconcilable opinions. Not informed opinions exclusively, of course, but also the opinions of conspiracy theorists, the news-phobic and the merely deranged. By such a scientific operation we may uncover the valuable truths that a third of Conservative voters would prefer to see Nigel Farage as prime minister, while 7% of American men believe they could beat a grizzly bear in unarmed combat.A deeper question is whether polls actually create, in whole or in part, what they purport to be revealing. Does everyone go around with settled, reasoned views on every hot-button issue of the day, just waiting to be revealed by a questioning pollster? The answer was clear to the American journalist Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book Public Opinion. It is unrealistic, he argued, to expect people to be able to form “sound public opinions on the whole business of government”, and they shouldn’t actually have to. “It is extremely doubtful whether many of us would … take the time to form an opinion on ‘any and every form of social action’ which affects us.”The act of asking a question, though, heightens the importance of the subject in the mind of the questionee, creating an urge to have one’s say where there might previously have been neither urge nor say at all. As Walter Bagehot, the 19th-century political theorist and editor of the Economist, once observed: “It has been said that if you can only get a middle-class Englishman to think whether there are ‘snails in Sirius’, he will soon have an opinion on it.” As though to prove him right, in 1980 a third of American respondents helpfully offered their view on whether the “1975 Public Affairs Act” should be repealed, even though that legislation did not actually exist.The way you ask the question, moreover, can profoundly influence the outcome. A 1989 study by the American social scientist Kenneth A Rasinski found that varying verbal framings of political issues changed the outcome: “More support was found for halting crime than for law enforcement, for dealing with drug addiction than for drug rehabilitation, and for assistance to the poor than for welfare.” Other such experiments have shown that the order of questioning also matters, that Americans express more support for government surveillance if terrorism is mentioned in the question, and that nearly twice as many people think that the government “should not forbid speeches against democracy” than it “should allow speeches against democracy”, though the options are exactly equivalent.Modern opinion polls, then, are part of the machinery behind the “manufacture of consent”, a phrase originally coined by Lippmann to describe the propaganda operations of politicians and the press. It is no accident, after all, that George Gallup had been an advertising man, with the Madison Avenue firm Young & Rubicam, before he helped to pioneer the methods of systematic opinion polling by borrowing from market research and PR. In 1936, Gallup and his colleagues correctly predicted the election of Franklin D Roosevelt, proving the old-fashioned forecasting methods outdated. Using the “new instrument” of polling, he declared happily in 1938, “the will of the majority of citizens can be ascertained at all times”. This was, of course, partly by way of advertising his own commercial interest as founder, in 1935, of the American Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup Poll). His fellow pollster Elmo Roper described their nascent industry as “a veritable goldmine”.Profitable it may be, but the constant drizzle of polling also incentivises short-term, knee-jerk decision-making by governments. A leader may make a hasty policy change merely in response to a poll, and then if the polling improves, take that as proof that the new policy is correct. Keir Starmer was no doubt cheered when, following his Enoch Powell-adjacent speech on immigration in May, polling found that “more Britons [now] believe that the government wants to reduce net migration”. But a policy designed to massage approval ratings over the course of weeks is not always going to be the same as a good policy that will last years.It would be invidious after all this not to mention one consideration that strongly favours opinion polls, which is that they provide a steady stream of pseudo-news to the media. If each day did not bring a new revelation about the imaginary public’s confected opinion on one or another issue, there would be much less for news programmes to report on. And what would we all do then?Further readingPublic Opinion by Walter Lippmann (Wilder, £7.49)Manufacturing Consent by Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky (Vintage, £12.99)Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by Michael Wheeler (WW Norton & Company, £13.99) More
