Last Friday, I was emailed by a secondary school teacher who is a member of the ASTI union. This person had been forwarded on, by the Union, a survey of secondary school teachers that was being conducted by RTE’s “Prime Time” team, presumably ahead of an upcoming show. The topic? Toxic Masculinity, naturally enough, given that this is the new topic of conversation for the great and the good.
You can find that survey (indeed you can answer it, whether you are a teacher or not), here.
It begins, in accordance with RTE policy, with asking teachers to assign their gender as “male”, “female”, or “other”, since it is the official position of the national broadcaster that there exist an as yet unknown number of genders, both discovered and undiscovered. That is far from the most egregious problem with the survey – but this kind of passive liberalism is the kind of thing that passes people by, unless it is pointed out.
The meat of the survey relates to questions about how often teachers have encountered specific kinds of behaviours. The meat of it begins with questions six:
“Have you heard or witnessed comments or discussions linked to traditional gender roles, masculinity or misogyny among young people within your school environment?”
And then there is question eleven:
“Over recent years, how frequently have you heard concerning mentions or discussions about The Tate Brothers (Andrew and Tristan Tate)?”
Note how imprecise this is: The question is about how often a teacher has heard “a concerning mention” of two specific TikTok influencers, Andrew and Tristan Tate. The nature of a teacher’s “concern” about discussions of those influencers is both assumed, and uninterrogated. It is followed up immediately by question twelve:
“If your school has male students: have you witnessed or heard concerning comments or behaviour you perceive to be linked to these online trends from male students directed specifically towards young women or female students?”
This is as close as we get to a definition of the “concern” mentioned in question eleven: Teachers are being asked here not about those influencers, but about “behaviour they perceive to be linked” to those influencers.
This is exactly what you would expect to see if you were loading a survey’s questions to get a particular result: On the one hand, you introduce the Tate brothers somewhat neutrally, asking how many people have heard their names being mentioned. Then, having planted that seed in your audience, you connect them indirectly to bad behaviour amongst students by asking about behaviours that you might “perceive” to be linked to them. There’s a basic scientific problem here: How many teachers would “perceive” certain behaviours to be linked to the Tate brothers if the survey itself hadn’t just linked those behaviours to the Tates in the prior question?
This is what is known in polling and survey construction as “poisoning the well”. Absent this article changing things, I would expect that on the “Prime Time” programme that the survey is reported on, we will only be given the answer to question twelve: The presenter will note that “many teachers perceive a link to Andrew Tate” without noting that the survey itself introduced Andrew Tate into the conversation. This is classic survey bias, and people in RTE are not so stupid as to have missed it. Which leaves open the possibility that the bias is deliberate.
Then we have question thirteen:
“Have you witnessed or heard concerning comments or behaviour you perceive to be linked to these online trends from male students directed towards female staff members?”
Again, note the phrasing: “Perceive to be linked”. But again, this perception and these links have been introduced by the survey itself.
Then we move to the section that asks for that favoured tool of every journalist, the anecdote, where teachers are asked to relate tales of horror for the consumption of RTE:
“Can you tell us about the last time you observed online misogyny affecting the behaviour or experiences of a student in your school?”
I will note here that this survey is – and this is really important – entirely anonymous. If you don’t believe me, go look at the link above, assuming RTE doesn’t take it down after this article is published. Nowhere are you asked to provide your contact information. Nowhere is there any way at all for RTE researchers to verify that you even are a teacher, let alone to contact you to verify your story. So, RTE is asking for anonymous anecdotes which it then intends to broadcast to the nation without even doing basic checking of the facts outlined in those anecdotes.
This is from the broadcaster that has just launched a “fake news and misinformation” task force, and it is not even doing basic fact checking.
The kicker comes with question 20:
To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement: “Online content increasingly seems to negatively influence young boys’ views of women or girls.”
This is the classic push-polling technique, leaving this question to last. What you do here is that you set up the survey so that people are asked if they would be concerned by certain behaviours, or if they have seen certain behaviours, and casts those behaviours in the negative: Previous questions have mentioned the Tate brothers, and mentioned that they operate online. Previous questions have mentioned misogyny and bad behaviour. So you have gotten your subject into the frame of mind where they are thinking about this stuff, and then you ask them a generic open question that is very easy to say “yes” to: Like “Do you agree that online content makes this worse”.
The result of that one, nobody will be surprised to learn, will be overwhelmingly positive. Because that is the result that the survey has been practically designed to get.
This is many things, but it is not journalism. It fails every standard of journalism, from objective fact-seeking to any effort at fact-verification, to avoiding weaving political narratives through your work.
Watch carefully, when the results of this survey are revealed, and see how RTE presents it. But then, you already know how they will present it, don’t you?