PRESENT TENSE: IF YOU picked up a copy of Metroor Herald AMon your way to work on Wednesday morning, you would have learned this stunning statistic: almost half of women love doing the washing-up.
What's more, 70 per cent dream of a pampering experience, such as a spa break or a manicure, as they are doing the washing-up.
And who brought you this vital research? Fairy washing-up liquid.
Surely this was done as a bet by a marketing man, insisting to his naive colleagues that no matter how ridiculous, how un-newsworthy, how skewed, how obviously a survey is an advert disguised as "news", that he would be able to get it into the papers? But there it was, accompanied in Metroby a big picture of Fairy's new "hands" model.
So what, you might think. It was a jokey survey in a tabloid freesheet.
Yes, but the brand got itself a cheap ad, potentially seen by millions of commuters across Ireland and Britain. It's good going for a washing-up liquid, and sets the bar a little higher for those PR companies who use surveys to get column inches. And that's pretty high, because the bar has been going up a notch almost every day since the mid-1990s.
Over the next week, do a rough count of the number of "surveys" reported in the papers, on the internet, on television and radio. In this week's papers, for instance, you would have found that "99 per cent urge cut in drink-drive limit", which sounds interesting until you read that the survey was carried out by the advocacy group, Public Against Road Carnage. You would have learned that "90 per cent fear hospital stay will damage health", although it was an online poll, which is pretty much the least reliable of resources.
Elsewhere, there was the news that "Cheryl Cole is the celebrity men least want to marry, a new poll reveals"; that "counting calories or handbags are methods women use to ward off insomnia, a survey from Travelodge found"; that "41 per cent favoured e-mailing colleagues, customers and suppliers over face-to-face meetings", according to a business communications company.
There are surveys every day of every week, in every corner of the media. Keep tabs on them, notice where they have come from, have a look to see how they were compiled, and you'll realise pretty quickly that the job of many reporters is to rewrite press releases.
Increasingly, they do it without question. They either have no time or no interest in checking who commissioned a survey, looking at the statistical samples, or examining the exact questions which were asked. And the PR companies know that they don't care.
At one time, PR firms simply attempted to confuse with statistics, or put out information that cast their clients in the best light. Now, they don't even have to do that. They commission a survey relevant to a client's image, bung a press release in an e-mail, and know that it's likely to get picked up somewhere.
A plethora of British and American books have recently attempted to poke the embers of serious journalism to see if any sparks remain. Nick Davies's Flat Earth Newsexamines, in some detail, the press's symbiotic relationship with the PR world. Newspapers need to fill increasing acres of space, despite diminishing resources, he argues. And they're too willing to let PR companies do that job for them.
The past decade has seen an explosion in snappy surveys, accompanied by amazing statistics and all-important lists. There are few things, it seems, that our culture enjoys more than a list. It is information in its simplest, most digestible, most satisfying form; that it is utterly worthless information hardly seems to matter.
This is not to say that there are not sound and important surveys. However, a statistically illiterate media so often misreads information, or simplifies it to suit the need for a pun-filled headline, that figures become distorted. Thrown in alongside the other pointless, skewed surveys, it can be difficult for the reader to differentiate between the valuable and valueless.
Surveys have become of such value to the print and broadcast media that they have become adept at employing them as a way of generating their own news, while gaining attention in other outlets.
News channels run constant polls (a favourite remains Sky News charging viewers to vote on whether they are paying too much for their mobile-phone bills). But more obvious is the commissioning of polls by newspapers - commonplace here and in the UK. They may have a certain news value, depending on the topic and timing, but it's worth asking whether political polls, which often appear years before an election, receive coverage disproportionate to their importance.
After all, we receive repeated lessons in how eve-of-election polls are those most likely to be accurate, and even that is not guaranteed. Yet surveys remain a regular feature of the media, because they fill the pages of those who commission them, and even fill spaces for their rivals. So the great circle of journalistic life goes on. Even if it appears to be suffocating.
