tim's experiment

As headlines go, “Opinion leaders believe business trumps heritage” certainly has the “read-me ingredient”. Because you have to wonder: how on earth did the SCMPost discover that?

The answer, alas, is that they didn’t. I should in fairness note here that people who think the old Central Government Offices should be turned into a shopping mall are, in my opinion, wrong. So I exemined this report with a certain extra skepticism. It was based on a poll, conducted by a market research company, which concluded, according to the newspaper’s report, that “The city’s opinion leaders believe Hong Kong means business and that the need for more commercial space overrides the need for preservation”.  So good by to the West Wing of the CGO.

Later in the story the opinion leaders had turned into “elite respondents”. In the small headline under the main one they were “the city’s elite”. Wow.

Which of course raises the question who are these opinion leaders who are the city’s elite? Or vice versa, if you prefer. Now opinion leaders in this context is a dangerous term. It arise in research into the way people formed their opinions about public issues in American towns. Researchers discovered that a lot of people did not generate their own views about such matters. They tended to follow influential individuals who were prominent in the community, like priests, newspaper editors, the chairmen of clubs and owners of the town’s more important enterprises.  But this is a slippery concept. Some people are opinion leaders because they have strong views, some because they have a lot of contacts. We must note also that this finding related to rather distant matters from most of the people forming the opinions. Remember the old joke: my wife decides the trivial things like where we should live and what we should eat, and I decide the important stuff like who should be the next president and whether we should sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty.  Actually we do not know if opinion on matters like heritage works the same way, or indeed whether opinion on anything in Hong Kong works the same way.

So the pollsters, I suppose, had to guess. We were given two indications of how the  “elite” was selected.  One was a list: “included writers, businessmen, lobbyists and strategists”. Well Shelley said that poets were “the unconscious legislators of mankind” so we can give them the writers, though I suppose they were not numerous. The businessmen are unavoidable because the polling was done by a market research company. Of course they think highly of businessmen. Whether the rest of us are very impressed by the opinions on public issues of this selfish bunch of bandits seems dubious. I do not know any sane person who would accept a second-hand opinion from a lobbyist, because lobbyists spend their time saying what they are paid to say. And what the hell is a strategist in this context? Did we include a few modern Major-Generals?

If you weren’t happy with the list we were given two rules. Respondents had to be aged over 25 and live in households with a monthly income of more than $40,000. In other words, no students, and as Basil Fawlty would say, “no riff raff”.

I really don’t know why we should give a hoot about the results of this exercise.  There is no reason to suppose that there are such things as “opinion leaders” in Hong Kong, still less that the Post and its paid pollsters know who they are. And no group which comfortably includes me can be considered “elite”.

I do wonder, though, why the newspaper thinks this sort of thing worth doing. After all the elite, whoever they are, do not lack opportunities to put their views before the public. Many of the writers and lobbyists polled are for hire. PR people and lawyers will queue up to speak for the rich. If the Post wishes to support the idea that Hong Kong means business it can print editorials on the matter. There is no need to manufacture non-news and the money spent on this exercise might have been devoted to real reporting.