Informal Surveys

I asked people to call in and tell me which dog breed made for the best all-around pet. The long-awaited winner? The American Water Spaniel. I’m waiting for CNN to call. I have a few sound-bites for them to write down: if an AWS were in the White House now, we wouldn't be having all these problems! Or: a deep cocoa in color, deliciously sweet in nature, the perfect dog for a chocoholic!

Enough. The point is the study was unscientific, the sample was biased, the results tainted. But it doesn’t matter—I covered my bases by calling it an informal survey, right?

So did Ms. Stewart when she once again took in letters about which American city is the most “well-mannered,” and then announced her “informal” results. Now, I can well believe that Charleston is indeed at the top of the heap no matter whose survey you’d employ (though if I were them, I'd rethink that slogan: "Charleston--where history lives!" since it wasn't always such a polite and well-mannered history). I’ll even acknowledge that I know nothing of second-place Peoria – it may be charming in the extreme. True, a subject of ridicule in literature and song, but possibly very well-mannered. But New York and Chicago – in the top ten of polite? No way. Ms. Stewart has just given “informal surveys” a bad name.