The Unoriginal Muse

This gates of Vienna post and this EU Referendum post both cover the recent YouGov poll (conducted by Daily Telegraph and also editorialised there), revealing how people with broadly similar ideas can make the same exact point and uyet sound completely different. Gates started by expanding upon the life of one George M Cohen, the prolific writer of so very many American classics. Educational it was, weaving in the words of another writer and surveying the YouGov poll with the a kind of resigned sadness. I’m not sure if perhaps some Americans have this image of “Europe” as hating them. It’s not surprising if they believe that: the picture broadcast on our behalf by the media is hardly one of love and compassion to our transatlantic cousins… but, despite this poll, I believe that’s all it is.

The EU Referendum post covers the poll from a different angle (and has a sister post by Helen Szamuely that focuses specifically on the “crude and vulgar” part of the poll, tearing our superior attitude in this instance to tiny little shreds, which I’m sure will delight the Americans), covering the real reasons for the “lack of trust” that this poll apparently shows. In short: jealousy. And I can believe that more readilly than the idea that we actually hate the US. It’s jealousy that drives the leftist mindset; jealousy that some can get more than others, tha tsome ar smarter, faster, stronger or just plain richer than they are. Jealousy makes people profess hatred. Interestingly, Dr North has pulled up a stat that Gates of Vienna seems to have missed, and presumably one that will be missed by nearly everyone on both sides of the political spectrum, from the ardent isolationists who see this as confirmation of Europes destiny as an islamic vassal, to the hard-left who apparently believe this continent can do no wrong, and that any criticisim from the various european peoples is confirmation of their own self-loathing hatred of the States. And that stat is how much trust people place in the television. 53% of respondents said they trust the television (which, in this instance, is more a code for the BBC: not because people watch it, per se, but because the rest of the media marches to their tune).

I laboured this point a fair bit the other day, but it’s worth mentioning it again. The kind of trust people on this side of the world place in the media is something that the US networks, especially on the left, can only dream about. With that sort of trust comes a great deal of power over how people think, what they believe and even how they express those beliefs. It’s entirely possible for the media to dictate how people think, who they vote for, what they buy… it isn’t absolute. People are still free agents and make decisions based on their own beliefs, so you won’t see the BBC flashing up pictures demanding everyon vote for the Liberal Democrats or anything. At least not yet… But they can influence the direction people think, the broad strokes of belief, in a way that the US doesn’t have to deal with.

As I said yesterday, this is something that a lot of people seem unable to understand. This nation, indeed most of the continent, is asleep. We’ve been lulled in to this sleep over the course of over half a century, by a media outlet that claims to be the final arbiter of knowledge. People trust the BBC because, for nearly all of the 20th century, there was nothing else. Even the “independent” broadcasters were influenenced enough by the BBC line to be virtually the same.

In the states you have real alternatives. You don’t have a monopoly broadcaster funded from the public purse, and you have a real representation of the political spectrum in yoru media. Even the left wing has to rely on commercial funding, so moderating its madness to a certain degree.

Bearing all that in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising that a country where over half the population trust the television more than their own parliament show a tendency to parrot the television’s line.

And,a s a final note, without the actual survey questions and a full breakdown of the answers it’s impossible to state whether the results trumpted by the Telegraph are actually accurate. Chances are these were multiple choice questions, an example being: “How much do you trust the US president” or something similar, with answers ranging from “not at all” to “absolutely”. Now, a bit of fiddling with the results can get you any result you like. If, for instance, there was a result so:

Not at all: 5%
Kind of: 20%
A fair bit: 38%
Pretty much: 25%
Definitely: 12%

You can get the headline-making result by simply grouping the first four answers in to “absolute hatred”. I’ve seen this done before and there’s a site out there called Number Watch dedicated to pointing out these osrts of things.

So, with all that in mind, I agree that the results of the poll are pretty horrible to read, but I don’t believe that things are as bad as they make out. Remmeber, this poll is being conducted by a media that is itself rabidly anti-american, so the questions will be loaded from the start and the answers messed areound until they give the right result. I wouldn’t put too much faith in those results, and I would hope that others can see through them. Don’t forget, the image you get of “europe” is filtered through the prism of the same media that hates you. Distroted doesn’t even begin to cover it.