We have all seen the television news item.
Gasoline prices have jumped overnight. A reporter is dispatched to a filling station. The camera finds someone standing beside an SUV watching the numbers spin upward on the pump.
“How is this affecting you?”
The answers are remarkably predictable.
“It’s getting ridiculous.”
“I’ll have to cut back somewhere.”
“We won’t be taking as many trips.”
“Everything is getting so expensive.”
“I can’t fill my tank – I can’t afford it”
Then another motorist says essentially the same thing. Perhaps a third is interviewed for confirmation.
And the story is complete. I have wondered for years why virtually nobody at these gas pumps ever says anything else.
Where is the motorist who says:
“I don’t like paying more, but perhaps gasoline has been too cheap given its environmental consequences”?
Where is the affluent driver who says:
“It’s annoying, but frankly another ten cents a litre won’t change anything I do”.
Or the person who drives very little and says:
“I suppose this is an argument for buying a smaller car”.
Or even the contrarian who says:
“If higher prices cause us to consume less gasoline, perhaps that isn’t entirely bad”.
Surely these people exist. I know they do because, once, I was one of them.
A television reporter approached me at a gas station after a price increase and asked how the higher price was affecting me. I said I could give her an alternative view.
Her response was essentially:
“That’s not the story we’re doing.”
I have thought about that exchange ever since. Because it revealed something important.
She wasn’t really asking what I thought.
She already knew what people at the gas station thought. Or, more accurately, she knew what the story required them to think.
I had been invited to supply a line in a script.
When I offered a different line, I was no longer useful.
The story existed before the interview
There is nothing sinister about this.
Reporters work under extraordinary time pressures. Television requires pictures. Gas prices are wonderfully visual. The giant roadside sign displays the new price. The pump numbers race upward. The motorist grimaces.
Everything needed for a 90-second story is conveniently located in one place.
And there is a perfectly legitimate story here. Sudden gasoline increases really do hurt people, particularly those with modest incomes who must drive long distances to work and have few transportation alternatives.
But that isn’t quite what these stories usually say.
They implicitly tell us that the public’s reaction to higher gasoline prices is uniformly negative.
That is a different proposition.
And the evidence presented for it has effectively been selected in advance.
It has become a ritual.
Certain economic events have acquired prescribed journalistic responses.
Gas prices rise: interview unhappy motorists. Food prices rise: interview shoppers examining grocery shelves. Property taxes rise: interview homeowners worried about making ends meet. Interest rates rise: interview someone renewing a mortgage.
The participants change. The script doesn’t. There is almost something ceremonial about it.
The reporter goes to the designated location, finds the designated person and elicits the designated response.
We rarely hear from the person who benefits from the change, supports the policy behind it, is unaffected by it, or simply interprets it differently.
That would complicate the story. And television dislikes complications.
But complications are where policy lives.
Gasoline is an especially interesting example because governments simultaneously pursue contradictory objectives.
We worry about affordability. We also worry about climate change.
We subsidize public transit and electric vehicles partly because we want people to consume less gasoline.
Economists have spent decades telling us that prices affect behaviour.
Then gasoline prices rise—and our news coverage treats any resulting reduction in consumption solely as a hardship.
There is a legitimate argument that gasoline prices should incorporate more of the environmental costs associated with consuming gasoline.
There is an equally legitimate argument that deliberately raising gasoline prices disproportionately hurts rural, northern and lower-income Canadians.
Those arguments can coexist. That is called public policy. But you wouldn’t know it from the gas pump.
Selection becomes opinion without anyone expressing one. This is what makes the ritual interesting.
The reporter doesn’t have to say: “Higher gasoline prices are terrible.”
The network doesn’t have to editorialize. It merely selects three people saying that higher prices are terrible.
Selection does the editorializing.
That distinction matters because journalism quite properly takes great care to separate reporting from opinion. But a news story can acquire a very strong point of view simply through deciding whom to interview and which answers make the final cut.
The missing voices are invisible. We cannot know whether reporters interviewed them and discarded their answers, or simply never looked for them.
My own experience suggests that at least sometimes the alternative answer isn’t wanted because it doesn’t fit “the story.”
That should bother journalists. Not because every 90-second gas-price item needs to become a seminar on carbon pricing.
But because the purpose of interviewing ordinary people should presumably be to discover what ordinary people think. If the acceptable answer has already been determined, why conduct the interview?
Try asking one more question
There is an extraordinarily simple remedy.
The next time gasoline jumps ten cents, send the reporter to the filling station as usual.
Interview the motorist who says the family vacation may have to be shortened.
That is real.
Interview the delivery driver whose livelihood genuinely is being squeezed.
That is important.
But then deliberately find someone who sees it differently.
Ask:
“Does the increase matter to you?”
“Should gasoline actually cost more for environmental reasons?”
“Would higher prices change what you drive?”
“Is there any upside to consuming less gasoline?”
The resulting story might be slightly messier. It would also be more interesting. And more truthful.
The gas pump ritual tells us something larger about journalism. Sometimes what appears to be reporting public opinion is actually reporting the portion of public opinion that fits a familiar narrative.
We should be particularly suspicious when every person interviewed by the news seems to have exactly the opinion the story requires.
People are rarely that predictable. News rituals are.
And when a reporter approaches someone with a microphone and asks, “What do you think?”, there ought to remain at least the possibility that the answer will change the story.