There has been an ongoing war between criminal law reformers and the media. Not with far right media, which has never been their metric of acceptable journalism, but with their loss of trust and fate with the outlets they thought were their allies, like the New York Times.

It’s not that the Times isn’t far more accommodating of their ideology than other, lesser, outlets, but that they still write stories that include occasional facts, positions, news, that does not shamelessly promote only their desired views. Why can’t all media outlets be like Slate, they demand to know, as they cancel their New York Times subscription in protest?

Ridiculous, you say? If ever there was a once-venerable media outlet that’s embraced social justice to the exclusion of facts, it’s the Times? Well, you say that only because you fail to share their moral clarity, that their version of reality is the right version, and any facts that conflict with their “truth” ought to be spun in such a way as to make clear why, no matter what, it proves their cause to be right and just. That’s because it is right and just. No matter what. The only reason their denialism fails to convince you is that the Times fails to do its job of backing them up.

A consequence of the media’s failure to only feed you the story spun their way is that people can end up believing things they reject as untrue, not because it’s necessarily false but because they are outraged that it conflicts with their version of the facts. We know this happens not because there are polls, surveys, telling us what people are thinking. And when people learn that others hold unacceptable views, whether because they are false (and they often are) or because they are not the views reformers want people to hold, people feel validated by knowing that others share their views.

What if you learned from a poll that the public’s thrall with Biden and the Democrats has waned significantly? What if you found out that most people aren’t radical progressives and don’t want to reimagine the nation in the image of a grievance studies doctoral candidate? Even worse, what if you learned that black and brown people prefer more police on their streets than their children getting shot on the way to school, not by cops but bad dudes?

These polls significantly undermine the story they want you to believe because they reveal that their stories aren’t believed. Maybe this is because the public is bad at assessing risk, is subject to various psychological effects that cause people to fear the wrong things, lacks the knowledge, education and experience to understand the complex trade-offs involved in making things better or worse. The point is that the public, as reflected by polling, isn’t necessarily right, and can often be quite wrong, in their feelings. But that doesn’t change the fact that their feelings are what they are. More importantly, that doesn’t change the fact that, right or wrong, the public is going to act upon those feelings. And reformers are pretty darn pissed about it.

The purpose of polling is to understand public opinion, even when it's wrong*, and not to re-educate the respondents.

* Arguably in this case, since it depends on what type of crime, what time frame and what location we're talking about. https://t.co/lwe7PFDazU

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 15, 2022

Whether crime is up or down is a complicated question. Up from when? Which crimes? The tough-on-crime hawks blame reforms because people tend not to appreciate the logical fallacy that correlation does not imply causation. There is much to dispute and argue about when it comes to the rising perception that crime is back on top of the list of public concerns.

Scott Hechinger is upset about it, so he’s trying to spin the purpose of polling to serve propaganda rather than information gathering. Nate Silver does what a pollster should do, explain that the purpose of polling isn’t to “educate,” which is an extremely generous word given that education isn’t the same as Hechinger’s desire for indoctrination, but measure public opinion.

What’s unsaid in this exchange is that polling, which not only measures but strongly influences public opinion, has largely remained above the fray. We don’t trust media. We don’t trust pundits. We don’t trust politicians. But we still have polls. Curiously, polling is particularly susceptible to abuse, given how the poll is conducted, the manner in which questions are asked, the specific language of polling questions, all of which can significantly skew the outcome such that the poll is wholly unreliable. The best check on polls are other polls, from trusted (for now) sources like Pew and Gallup. If one poll is an outlier to others, it suggests that whoever conducted the poll either sucks at it or is trying to cheat.

But just as reformers recognized the opportunity to take elections that few knew or cared about, and put their efforts into capturing district attorneys offices, will they now recognize polls as the gaping wound in their effort to influence people’s views?

The social justice capture of the media has been largely successful, even if not as perfect as they hoped and expected. Ironically, their perception of the effort is that if the media does not toe their line faithfully, it’s as bad as right wing media. Tolerance for any variance from the orthodoxy is not suffered.

But media still needs to make money to survive, and it’s fairly obvious when it neglects stories of sordid murder and mayhem in favor of another deep dive into how hard it is for a black transsexual to be marginalized at Harvard.

The attack on polling for doing its job of measuring public opinion rather than telling the public what it should believe has now begun. If history is any indicator, the next step in the effort to correct public opinion will be to capture the pollsters, or create alternative polling, that can be used to influence public perception that few believe what the many believe, proving that the many are wrong and alone, and the woke will prevail.