Thumb ledes

Two cases of the thumb lede in the first four pages of the morning paper.

Why "thumb lede"? Because you can place your thumb over the first paragraph with no damage to the rest of the story! See how easy it is?

There will be no panda-monium in the Motor City.

It's a little hard to forget about the notion, especially if you forgot it shortly after somebody said it on TV a year and a half ago, but you'll notice that the second graf has all the impact of the first, with none of the panda-monium. (As an added bonus, though, the story actually gets worse online: the fourth graf becomes "It's simply too dang expensive.")

On to page 4A and a metrically flawed thumber: Cookies and brownies and Rice Krispies treats, oh my!

... garnished (healthfully!) with a piece of elongated yellow fruit: "the tasty — but less healthy — homemade confections."

Beware the thumb lede. Why make readers wade through your prose before they get to your news?

Thumb lede

Pro tip: When you have a great idea for a lede, lie down and wait until the idea goes away. Then write your story and move on to the next thing. The test is whether you can place your thumb over the entire lede and still get everything you need out of the story. 

The Great Fraser Sinkhole is the sort of small-scale technological disaster that -- aside from being quite large-scale to the people affected by it -- should be a reminder to everyone of the value of competent, appropriately funded gummint at every level. So the answer to:

Who would have guessed officials would have cheered poop in a pipe?

... is "pretty much everyone who's been paying attention," though if you've been waiting all year to enjoy the satisfaction of saying "poop in a pipe," you should probably see if the TV stations are hiring. 

Should we have missed the news on Tuesday (as I did, being busy), it'd be nice to get it in a compact, professionalized format on Wednesday in more or less the usual time and place. I wonder if hubs are going to feel empowered to challenge (or better, simply delete) the occasional thumb lede.

Double-thumbing

Any lede of the form "and then there were [n]" is presumptively a thumb lede, so there's one line you can save. But pause a moment on the second paragraph: yes, that's how this sort of tournament works. You could actually begin at the third paragraph with no damage to the integrity of the story -- the rare double-thumb lede.

Also time for the annual reminders: No "still dancing." No "sweet" or "elite" in headlines. And a particular point for this year: Basketball as a rule involves 10 players on the court at a time (five per side). In any game scheduled for this weekend, then, at least nine, and perhaps as many as 10, of the players on the court at any given time are not Zion Williamson. Please adjust all broadcast commentary accordingly.

Rule of thumb

Here's the Rule of Thumb for ledes: If you can put your thumb over the lede with no effect whatsoever on the story that follows, you can (and probably should) just delete the lede.

Owing to its strange incarnation of the no-jump policy, the Freep's capital buro managed to come up with, in essence, two disposable ledes on the same story* in one day. At top is the 1A version:

This time they stirred the drink -- added a twist -- and it came out just right.

And for 5A, a Forbidden Lede steps in:

What a difference a month makes.

Neither of which does any good if you're interested in finding out what went on (and, despite the newspaper industry's widespread fear of the first-day lede, there's actually a good chance that lots of the readership hasn't heard of the previous day's doings in the statehouse). For that, the second graf of the 1A billboard or the second graf of the featurized version inside would do just fine.

There'd still be plenty of bad writing to go around -- the concluding graf on 1A, for example:
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Left hand, right hand

When the 6A jump from your 1A politics story says something about a candidate's plans -- say, "Biden hasn't scheduled an appearance in the state ahead of next Tuesday's balloting" -- it's perfectly all right to give your left hand a little bit of a clue on what thy right hand doeth on the facing page:

One of the beauties of the factory model of journalism is that at some point, both of these items should have passed the same spot on the assembly line, at which someone's job it is to make sure that "Tigers 6, Sox 5" in the 1A teaser is still "Tigers 6, Sox 5" by the time we get to the sports front -- or "nope, no Biden" on 6A is still "nope, no Biden"on 7A. War on Editing-wise, that once-vital position is now pretty far forward of the main line of resistance.

Journalism textbooks have often had a tendency to overstate the risks to credibility created by small deviations from the beaten path, particularly in the secret handshakes of the stylebook: No, your audience will not actually flee to the competition in droves should you choose to abbreviate "Rd.," in blatant violation of AP style. (I haven't tested it yet, but I'd be interested in knowing whether Real People aren't more confused by -- or, more precisely, whether they don't see a greater inconsistency in -- the mandate that "Ave." be abbreviated with a numbered address but spelled out otherwise.) Credibility tends to be less granular; here are the scales we used to index it in a study last year:

well trained vs. poorly trained
accurate vs. inaccurate
can be trusted vs. can’t be trusted (α = .913, if you're scoring along at home)

In a vacuum, it's hard to claim that cutting some position -- or taking a step out of the assembly line -- is an economically irrational decision, rather than a cost-benefit calculation that we happen to disagree with. And it is a truth certain that there were blunders -- ghastly, incredible, textbook-worthy blunders -- in the glory days of full staffing and vigilant slotting. But there are examples that make a case for building a few steps back into the process before it all degenerates to (in Roy Greenslade's term) "copy thrown online with a photo." This is one.

And for dessert, there's this perfect Thumb Lede* atop the 1A part of the story:

* Meaning, for the uninitiated, that you can place your thumb over the lede with no impact on readibility or comprehension of the following story.

Cliche corner: Your cheating IRS

That rule of thumb again: When you can put your thumb over a large portion of the lede with no impact on the alleged news that follows, you should consider killing the lede. So it is with

Seeming to disprove the adage that crime never pays, even behind bars, prisoners received $39.1 million in undeserved federal tax refunds during 2009 through false or fraudulent tax returns, according to an Internal Revenue Service report to Congress.

As adages go, that's a rather dumb one. For general career-planning purposes, crime pays fairly well if you don't get caught and less well (often spectacularly so) if you do. "Behind bars" wasn't part of the cliche to begin with, and even so -- if the scamming has been so closely identified, you're justified in asking whether it has paid at all.

WWMS (what would Mencken* say?): "As a Christian I forgive the man who wrote the story and the news editor who passed it. But both will suffer in hell."

The hed's also a nice example of the sort of ambiguity you can create by following the standard rules of hed dialect. My first-glance, coffee-deprived reading was "(the) cheating IRS," rather than "cheating (the) IRS."

* From a letter to H. Allen Smith (of "Rhubarb" fame), then writing features for United Press. The topic was the Charles Fort phenomenon, and Mencken, as usual, is worth quoting in context:

Your story describing the funeral of Charles Fort lists me as one of his customers. This was a libel of a virulence sufficient to shock humanity. As a matter of fact, I looked upon Fort as a quack of the most obvious sort and often said so in print. As a Christian I forgive the man who wrote the story and the news editor who passed it. But both will suffer in hell.

Forbidden ledes

For all you junior league players out there,* here's a diagnostic test. When removing the lede paragraph from a story produces utterly no effect whatsofreakingever on the subsequent content, you have a lede you should kill. As in:

Call it good news that could be a whole lot better.

Cancer incidence decreased about 1 percent a year from 1999 to 2006, and deaths dropped an average of 1.6 percent a year from 2001 to 2006, according to a report released by the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Cancer Society and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries.

"Call it" is your first hint. It's on the master list of Forbidden Ledes, which should have been freshly etched on your forehead with a soldering iron this month, owing to the high likelihood of Christmas coming early and grinches doing stuff to unlocked cars and all that. But more to the point: Place your thumb over the first graf. Read the second graf. Now go back and read the first graf.** Might as well throw the poor thing out, gratuitous reporterly judgment and all.

You shouldn't kill ledes at random, true. Editors look out for writers' interests as zealously as they look out for readers' interests. But both those parties are served best when the Great Cliches are quietly left to die on the floor of the composing room. Really.

* Sorry, too much Don Cherry in the media diet of late up here.
** If you're a Fox reader, remember to raise that thumb first!***
*** That wasn't very nice, was it? Won't happen again.

Forbidden ledes: Thumb test

Today's tip: When you're tempted to begin your story with one of the Great Cliches,  stop for a moment and put your thumb over the cliche. If the ensuing text makes just as much sense as it did before, go ahead and delete your precious lede. (Yes, even if it's just a brief.) Your readers will be none the wiser, but if they were, they'd thank you.

If they didn't, they should have

Today's lesson in the Virtues of Not Making Stuff Up comes to you courtesy of -- well, just about everybody. Here's a lede from today's local guardian of the public weal:

Prosecutors, defense attorneys and an eager public will have to wait again -- this time until at least next month -- for Judge Ronald Giles to rule whether any of 200 text messages from Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his former aide Christine Beatty will be revealed.

Got it? OK. What does that lede have in common with this hed from America's Fair'n'Balanced Network?

Italians Shocked After Sunbathers Relax on Beach Near Dead Bodies

Anybody ready to take a try? Exactly! Neither one is, well, you know, exactly true -- but if they aren't, they ought to be. The Freep has no evidence -- meaning "none in the story," which is a pretty good stand-in here for "none, period" -- that there's an "eager public" waiting to read stuff they've been reading since ... gee, was it really January? Fully six months before Jon Stewart put the Residence Inn in Madison Heights on the National Love Map?

OK, I'm feeling like I want another night like the most recent Saturday at the Residence Inn!


Edge of my seat, I'm telling you.

And Fox? Almost the same. The story has some bodies and some sunbathers, but there's no way to tell if any Italians were shocked in the making of this story, because nobody bothers to ask any of them. But like the Freep's eager public, it tends to slide right past the slot, because -- well, no doubt some of them are shocked, or would be if we asked them, but mainly because shocked is what Real People should be at the very thought of such a thing.

Things like "Critics blast Obama's West Bank trip," noted here earlier, get more attention because of the blatant ideological thumb on the scales. But they're not that different in substance. Fox doesn't have a critic to present, but there has to be one out there; the Freep doesn't have an "eager public," but if the ungrateful swine aren't eager to hear about the text messages, they should be.

Welcome to the Wonderful World of News, where everything we tell you is true -- or, if not, is the way things ought to be.

How news puts a thumb on the scales

I'm not complaining about the headline, which I think is one of those cases in which "objective" journalism works perfectly well. A straight-faced rendition in big type of a bullshit claim* allows the bullshit to shine through without putting the news outlet on one side or the other. My concern is with the lede,** in which a commonplace bit of news practice -- trying to get back on-cycle by emphasizing what was "confirmed," rather than what happened -- actually does put the agency on the side of the bad guys and con artists:

Jamal Khashoggi died during a fight inside Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul, Saudi authorities confirmed late Friday. The announcement, made on state TV and also released via the official Saudi Press Agency, comes more than two weeks after the missing journalist disappeared after entering the diplomatic compound in Turkey.

Like it or not, one basic definition of "news" is something that happened since the last edition (or broadcast, or "time you updated the homepage" for you kids). That's what enabled urchins to hawk tabloids through the teeming streets a century ago, and it's why "confirming" a story on which you were beaten is a standard tactic: you can reclaim the element of what-happened-today without having to credit the outfit that hosed you.

Here, though, USA Today grabbed the wrong verb -- or, at least, ignored the scope of the verb it did grab. It's news that the Saudis have acknowledged Khashoggi's death, but that's not the same as acknowledging -- or "confirming" -- the purported circumstances of his death. As a consequence, USAT (and any other paper for which the assorted Gannett hubs nodded and yawned and waved this through) looks like a tool of the administration and its friends du jour.

Note, on the other hand, the indications of apparent skepticism in this graf: 

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Left hand, right hand

How are things going at the local print product these days? Consider these facing pages from the Sunday morning A section.

To your left at the top, just under your thumb if you were reading this on actual newsprint, is the weekly Gruff Old Reporter column, this week about a county commissioner who was elected despite his troubles with the law. I have a low tolerance for "commish," "300 grand," "the feds" and the like (no "hizzoner" this week, because no mayors were involved) unless the next scene has either Roz Russell or Cary Grant shouting into a telephone,* but at least there's some substance amid the writering:

Newly elected Monroe County Commissioner Mark Brant says he's eager to serve his constituents — but first he has to serve time.

Brant is scheduled to report to federal prison in Morgantown, West Virginia, on Friday, making this a Thanksgiving he'll always remember — even if he'd rather forget. Brant was sentenced to 18 months in Club Fed, fined $500,000 and agreed** to give up the more than 300 grand the feds found in his Monroe home after he pleaded guilty to what Uncle Sam calls "maintaining a drug-involved premises."

Now over to the right-hand page:

MONROE -- On Monday, Nov. 18, Mark Brant was sworn in as District 2 Monroe County

commissioner by Monroe County Clerk and Register of Deeds Annamarie Osment.

Erm. OK, assuming we all know who Mark Brant is (but don't remember him from the facing page), just snick off that opening prepositional phrase, start with the name, stick a "Monday" after "commissioner" and call it a lede. But could there be anything of some interest to your non-Monroe readers?

In the Nov. 5 general election, despite a federal indictment, Brant won the election with 6,811 votes. Write-in candidates, Democrat Danielle Hoover and Dwayne Dobbs, received 687 votes collectively.

Oh my. And?

It has not been made public when and where Brant's prison term will commence.

Does something seem out of order here? Skip down to the fifth paragraph:

... In March, Brant pleaded guilty to one federal count of maintaining a drug-involved premise.

In the old days, people called "copy editors" sat around newspaper offices on Saturday night and ... edited. Not just buffing your grammar, writing your heds and making sure stories didn't begin "On Monday," but remembering stuff. If one editor didn't know whether Nixon was impeached (no) or how Edgar Allan Poe spelled his middle name (the Times was wrong again), another would. And somebody who either remembered where Jesus talked about the left hand not knowing what the right hand doeth or had the good sense to look it up would have wandered over to to the city desk and noted that a couple of the discrepancies here really ought to be fixed in a big smoking hurry if we expect people to pay for this stuff.

I'm staunchly pro-local-news, and I'm a subscriber, even if I read the morning paper on a tablet in pdf form. But somebody at the Gannett hub seems bent on making that habit seem unnecesary.

* If you have not seen a Linotype in action, just go ahead and get off my lawn.
** Pesky parallel structure. 

Language change: Ur doin it ... uh, however

This just in from the cousins at Fox. Before you read any further: What's your instant reaction? If it's the same as mine was, you're right -- but maybe not as right as you (or I) thought.

Here's the lede, appearing on Fox more or less as it appeared on the AP wire:

NAPA, Calif. — The California Highway Patrol says four college students are dead after their car skidded into oncoming traffic on a two-lane Napa Valley highway.

Still fits with the hed, right? Good old Fox, easing into the 1970s on the inclusive language front!

The CHP has not identified the four men, whose ages ranged from 19 to 22, but said all four attended Pacific Union College in Angwin.

Well, that'll make you slam on the brakes. When did men become "coeds" -- especially at one of the few US outlets that still regularly use the word in its original (now strongly disfavored) meaning? Is this usage a one-off or part of a trend? Let's start in the references.

We get "coed" from "co-education," which enters the fray in the mid-19th century for the practice of letting girls study along with boys. A co-educational school became a co-ed* (no weirder than your car or your favorite handgun being an "automatic"), and then the noun came to mean a girl or woman studying at such an institution.** The hyphen persists in AP texts into 1977,*** though it seems to be gone a year later.

The adjective "coed" is still in fairly active, unremarkable use, even though it seems to be most often used in nonacademic contexts like athletics (or, in 1978, the White House honor guard). The noun has gone on the bad list -- the MWCDEU says that movement was in play by 1980, though news texts at that point are still rife with "coeds" in news and feature stories alike. The timing makes sense; that's about when the Miller and Swift "Handbook of nonsexist writing" came out. And if you compare recent AP texts with a stack from 1980, you'll note that "coed" for "female student" has just about vanished. Getting there from here requires a little detour into how news language looks at the inclusive language ("political correctness," if you absolutely must) movement.

The problem with "coed" isn't that it distinguishes female from male (often a useful thing to do), but that it distinguishes female students from students. In the same way that "lady doctor" and "male nurse" create a normal condition and a marked condition for those professions, "coed" suggests that there are real students and girl students -- not a very welcoming observation at the start, and these days an out-and-out stupid one. So it seems like the sort of thing you want to shy away from if you're trying to publish for a general audience, particularly if you're the Liberal Media, right?

Not so fast. News language has actually been pretty conservative when it comes to social inclusion, for a variety of interrelated reasons:
* The appeal to tradition: We've always done it that way, that's what readers expect, nobody will know what it means if we start calling Those People something else (far as I know, 2004 is the first edition of the AP Stylebook that doesn't mention "the Negro race").
* The "clear pane of glass" fallacy: The words we use now are the original, unweighted words, and any deviation from that standard puts a thumb on the journalistic scales. Thus, "African American" is a "euphemism" for "black," rather than another in a long string of attempts to find a socially appropriate term.
* Loony literalism, the insistence that a correct or technical reading renders a term nonsensical or logically impossible and thus out of bounds. The 1984 AP Stylebook proclaims that Indians can't be called Native Americans because "their ancestors came over on a land bridge from Asia."
* Wariness of giving in -- at least, of being seen as capitulating to any request, whether reasonable or not (hence the inmates-running-the-asylum tales, usually apocryphal, about bans on "black coffee" and the like).

That's where Fox in particular comes in (though it's far from alone in that camp). Fox World is a scary place, especially if you're a missing pregnant mom, but it's also a very comfortable one, because things are the way they Ought To Be. Fox spends the time turning AP's "Quran" and "Muhammad" back into "Koran" and "Mohammed" (which AP dropped nearly a decade ago) because -- well, give those people an inch and next thing, your kids will be studying Farsi, right?

Thus, "coed" for "female student" has persisted at Fox long after most outlets wrote it out, particularly in heds on agency stories:

California Coed Reportedly Bailed out of Iran Jail
Judge Keeps American Student, Co-Defendant Jailed in Slain British Coed Case
Kansas Jury Recommends Death in Coed's 1996 Slaying

... but also in news copy that Fox produces itself:
Detectives in three states on Thursday were hunting for clues in the mysterious shooting murders — a day apart — of two college coeds from Georgia, and sources have told FOX News that an arrest may be imminent in one of the killings.

All of which makes sense, until you come to "coeds" meaning "four male students." Is that a first? As it turns out, no -- the AP's already gone there, and in a national trender, no less. The topic is the looming end of the tray in college cafeterias:

Advocates of the trayless cafeterias say if students can't pile on the food as Bluto did, they might consume fewer calories and keep off those unhealthy pounds often gained in college.

Try telling that to hungry coeds who simply make more trips to the counter.

"I'll just keep coming back for seconds," said Jeff Lyke, a freshman at Glenville State, which started going trayless in April to coincide with Earth Day.

So has "coed" actually slipped the surly bonds of its original meaning and become just another unmarked word for "undergraduate"? Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence -- anybody got a third case?

[UPDATE: Jan Freeman's thorough and delightful exploration of this matter, from 2005, can be found here, and The Word is at last available in the blogroll.]

* Per the OED, it was a noncount noun a few decades before this usage came along.
** And probably to mean any female student, even one at an all-female school; that might be worth a look sometime.
*** 1977 is the first year the AP Stylebook appeared as a full-size reference book, rather than the slender typography-oriented thing that had been around since the 1950s. I don't have a '77 and have no idea whether the hyphen variance is accidental or deliberate.

Thumb on the scales

Latest in a series of comments on the strange combination of big picture and little picture that goes into life on the copydesk. Here's the lede hed from a major Southeastern daily* this morning.

Big picture: One of the known ongoing failings of the U.S. press is its excessive focus on the executive side in general and the president in particular. Coverage of Congress is spotty at best, coverage of statehouses is more or less an endangered species, but the president's every action is recorded in detail. And, conversely, stuff that's important on its own -- particularly international news -- faces an additional hurdle in that it has to be commented on by the president (or the Mouth of Sauron) before it gets into circulation. In the case at right, a low-bore development that has almost no relevance to the ongoing story of the bridge collapse is elevated into Story of the Day prominence. Given that everything else above the fold is either FOOTBALL or NEWS2USE, that means real news moves even farther to the back of the bus.

Little picture: "Get this bridge rebuilt" is imperative, and that's a grammatical and factual distortion of what the president said. Here are two quotes in which the phrase appears:

Our message to the Twin Cities is, we want to get this bridge rebuilt as quick as possible, that we understand this is a main artery of life here -- that people count on this bridge and this highway system to get to work.

One of our jobs is to work with the governor and the mayor and the senators and the members of the Congress to cut through that paperwork, and to see if we can't get this bridge rebuilt in a way that not only expedites the flow of traffic, but in a way that can stand the test of time.

The hed sounds like a stern leader giving an order that Must Be Obeyed. At a guess, it's an artifact of news routines (did somebody give Mark a Herbert Gans anthology for his birthday or something?) rather than deliberate news slant. It is, after all, literally "true" in that Bush said those words in that order. It fits. It's timely and perky (not necessarily "active," though that misnomer does accurately represent the news value of sounding loud and busy). But if your hypothetical media critic from Mars were to suggest that journalism structure and news routines tend to result in pro-administration bias even in the allegedly "liberal" "media," he/she/it wouldn't get much argument here.


* OK, here's the deal. I'll stop saying "major Southeastern daily" if all the academic journals will stop saying "large Midwestern university."

Today in clickbaiting

Doesn't the headline just fill you with the urge to click on through and see what the answer is? That seems to be the mission, at least; the Fox News website has discovered the magic of clickbaitery and is jumping in with enthusiasm.

Not too artfully, though. If you're going to have a cliffhanger in the No. 5 spot on the homepage for Super Bowl Sunday, it probably shouldn't be the same one that was in the No. 5 spot on the homepage last Monday:

 You might even think a lede that refers to the Super Bowl as "next Sunday" was a bit of a giveaway:

Whether the New England Patriots win or lose Super Bowl 53 against the Los Angeles Rams next Sunday, Tom Brady is not ready to ride off into the sunset just yet.

When asked during an interview with ESPN that aired Sunday if there was any chance his ninth Super Bowl would be his NFL swan song, Brady said: "Zero," curling his thumb and fingers into a "0" shape to emphasize the point.
 
And there's always that pesky label over the story noting that it was posted "6 days ago":

So Fox seems a little slow in getting the hang of the whole clickbaiting thing. Maybe it should put the starters back in or preach the gospel of RTFP more loudly or something.

Being of the generation for which the whole point of the headline is to tell people something they didn't know, I have a deep dislike for clickbaiting in all its forms and guises. I'm not at all sure how widely that feeling is shared. Attitudes toward headlines seem to be shaped by the routines that readers are familiar with. If the flying verb or the noun pile looks weird to you, it's probably because you haven't scarfed down half a dozen before breakfast each day for the past 20 years.

The evidence so far is that the up-and-coming wave of news consumers isn't especially bothered by clickbaiting, though there is (hey, it's clickbaiting) This One Weird Trick: Traditional heds do better on error-heavy stories, but clickbait heds do better on well-edited stories. Clickbaiting also seems to be associated with better memory for story details. You don't even want to hear about what the photos do.**

* I'm trying really hard not to say "grownup" and apparently failing.
** Yes, you do. Film at 11.

But can you use it in a sentence?

I don't know where your tipping point was, but I started to tire of election post-mortems about last Thursday. Like public opinion surveys, what's exciting about them isn't usually very valid, and what's valid about them isn't usually very exciting. Whether old media or new media, they tend toward the sort of see-you-shoulda-listened-to-me brand-building that ages poorly. (And -- actual southerner here -- I'd be happy if the broadcast oligarchs of 2026 tell James Carville to just go stick his head in a barrel and yell for a while.*)

So above is a morning-after lede from the AP for your consideration, offered less as a diagnosis than as a way of thinking about what news could look like over the ensuing months and years. What struck me, as an old paid-to-read-this-stuff hand from back in the Carter administration, was how unusual it seems to see "Trump" and "felony conviction" in the same paragraph -- compared with, say, the number of times you saw "Biden" close to "disastrous debate" in AP stories in the past five months.** That points us toward some conclusions about how the agenda-setting paradigm, and what we know about media effects in general, can help attack the conventional wisdom.

My starting point is some of the self-justifying blather I'm seeing on the right flank: People weren't fooled -- they knew exactly what they were voting for, and that's what they wanted. I agree that a large proportion of US voters knew exactly who they were voting for: the lying, gropey, vengeful old clown who thinks all the world's a sound stage and hates all the people they wish they could hate. What they were voting for is a different question, and that's where Fox News comes into the equation.

We've known for two decades that Fox users are more likely than users of grownup media to believe in things that aren't so. Kull et al (2003) looked at beliefs about justifications for the second US-Iraq war: presence of WMD, strong Qa'ida-Iraq links, and worldwide support for a US invasion. Fox users were the most likely to hold at least one misperception; public media users (and in those glorious days, newspaper readers) the least likely to hold any misperceptions.

Because it doesn't hit the usual metrics of polling drama during campaign season (see above, under sexy vs. valid), you might not have seen an October survey from Ipsos that looked at the relationship between news source and political understanding. Unsurprisingly, participants who get their news from Fox and other right-wing outlets saw immigration as the most important problem facing the country; for participants overall, it was the economy; in the category of national newspapers and (non-Fox) cable, the MIP was "political extremism or threats to democracy."

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