CNN asks the most pointless poll question ever

And gets an appropriately pointless answer.

According to the “Breaking News” alert that CNN just blasted into my email box, the news channel asked a sample of 1,008 adult Americans about the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a fixation on which CNN plainly is in need of some professional counseling.

Among the responses: 46% think “the arduous search is being conducted in the wrong place.”

It’s hard to measure how stupid the question is that elicited this response. One can safely say that not a single respondent had any idea why the search is taking place where it is, and precious few could pinpoint the search area on a map. Who could possibly care what a random selection of Americans answering their phones thinks about where the search for a missing airliner is being conducted?

What we have here is the confluence of several ridiculous trends. One is the faith of CNN--all right the faith of most news organizations--in the significance of poll results. Another is the treatment of opinion polls as entertainment, though an extremely degraded caliber of entertainment at that. Opinion polls once were used by businesses to map out product strategies, and political campaigns to get a handle on the zeitgeist.

Now they’re being used for--what? To tell experts in search and recovery how to deploy their millions of dollars in assets, based on the hunches of a few hundred nobodies who’ve thought about the issue for all of four seconds before answering?

CNN’s obsession with the Malaysian aircraft, its determination to turn every evanescent nugget of information into an earthshaking breakthrough, has long since become a national joke, maybe even a global joke. The seriousness with which it approached this opinion poll can be gleaned from some of its other “findings”: 57% think terrorists were involved, 9% think it was space aliens. This isn’t a published result, but inescapably the percentage of respondents who knew anything germane at all about the event was 0%.

CNN has now become the nation’s outstanding purveyor of factoids. This term has come to mean trivial facts, but that’s wrong. As coined by Norman Mailer in his 1973 book about Marilyn Monroe, the term means non-facts or, more precisely, “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper.” Or on a cable TV network. (CNN didn’t exist at the time.) One is tempted to say that CNN has now reached a new low, but the evidence suggests that it has a long way to go before hitting bottom.