Opinion Polls Gage Only Levels of Denial
To ESPN.com,
As the nations leading sports television network, you at ESPN are beholden to the public for revenue and relevance. It follows that your associated website would prominently feature an interactive poll primed to gage the general opinion of your fans by asking various sports related questions and providing several answer choices from which they might choose. Often these polls generate hundreds of thousands of responses from every state in the country, as well as several locations internationally.
I currently live with seven other college-aged young men, and because of their prominent presence in my life I watch and discuss sports almost exclusively with those in the house. Often when discussing sports, members of the house will offer their own opinions of things, including critiques of past plays as well as their take on current controversies. Because of the proximity and consistency of my roommates’ presence, opinions of these few individuals can be easily misinterpreted as the veritable pulse of the nation. But the connectivity of the modern world, including your web portal, allows such opinions to be held in check relative to the general sentiments of the nation, especially through such vehicles as your SportsNation polls.
So when the recent steroid controversy entangled the prominent baseball player Alex Rodriguez, house-opinion held him to be a cheater and liar, two characterizations that, when combined with his status as a member of the hated New York Yankees, his signing of two separate multi-year contracts valued at nearly 300-million-dollars each, and his inability to come through in the clutch, reinforced his teammate-provided nickname of A-Fraud (a play on his A-Rod moniker). After gathering the pulse of the house, I retired to my room and scanned the latest ESPN.com poll regarding the incident. The survey asked of participants, “If it guaranteed you a $250M contract like Alex Rodriguez, would you take performance-enhancing drugs?”
Having already formed my opinion on the issue of steroids in sports, I immediately responded to the poll question in the affirmative. Steroids, when compared to other drugs, provide little known risk of permanent negative result when used appropriately, and if I knew that I could ensure my own financial independence as well as that of a small third-world nation I would not hesitate to take performance-enhancing drugs.
Normally these polls are designed to force the respondents to choose between two or more equally defensible positions or opinions, such as who would win in a fight, Mike Tyson in his prime or a juvenile elephant. But this question seemed so skewed that to me it made for a very weak survey, akin to asking, “What is cuter, a puppy hugging a duckling or an AIDS sore?” After all, who in good conscience would turn down the opportunity to better their lives, to make a positive social change through charity or other means, and to ensure the security of their bloodline for generations (as well as get stronger and faster) by doing what everyone else in their profession had already done, and the only risk they ran was a chance of discovery and being labeled a cheat by a myopic public?
One could only imagine my surprise at the results of the poll:
Though I sympathized with a majority of the respondents, the realization that 37% of those polled responded in the negative left me dumbfounded and at a complete loss. My attempts to reconcile the results with what I thought were basic human reactions proved baffling. Fortunately I then realized that this poll does not accurately assess the nation’s thoughts on the subject at hand but rather the level of denial held by most respondents concerning their own level of self-righteousness. Wealth is a goal aspired to by nearly all Americans, and the refusal of 250-million-dollars simply because of the relatively arbitrary consequence of being exposed as one who sought a competitive advantage in a cut-throat industry is simply outlandish, especially considering the economic downturn of the market today. In fact, if the poll read:
I would expect the results to follow, simply because some people know too many individuals for killing them all to be a feasible course of action.
The only reasonable explanation I can determine as to why such a large number of respondents would turn down wealth beyond their wildest dreams is because of their own inane sense of denial. If I announced with a bullhorn that I had a quarter of a billion dollars to be given to the first person who reached me, people would be hacking each other to pieces with machetes in an effort to reach my location first, and such a response would be fully expected given the nature of mankind. As such, I no longer hold the results of these polls with any merit, and henceforth will rely only on the opinions of my reasonable housemates for gathering the real pulse of SportsNation.
All the Best,
Timothy
Lee
