Spam Journalism #43

Spam Journalism: The spurious use of sensational headlines to add spice to an otherwise pointless article.

Sometimes, the spam headline is so laughable, that it detracts from the sensationalistic value of it. Could anything sound dumber than this?

Theft fears as smacking ballot hits letterboxes

“A record roll of just over 3 million New Zealanders will start receiving voting papers today for the country’s first citizens-initiated referendum to be conducted by postal vote.

“The ballot, asking whether smacking should be a criminal offence, raised fears yesterday that enthusiasts on both sides may try to corrupt the vote by stealing voting papers from letterboxes over the next few days.”

Unlike the journalist who wrote this piece of nonsense, most of my readers (who are clearly quite discerning) will have spotted immediately that theft of ballots from letter boxes is an utterly pointless way of trying to influence an election. How would you know that the ballot papers you steal are from people who would not vote your chosen way? And how would you know when they are going to be delivered (or are you going to check every day for a week)?

But the real silliness is that, in order to change the vote by just 1%, you would have to steal at least 20,000 ballots, assuming a 2/3 voter turnout and assuming that every paper you stole would have gone to an opposing voter. This is an absurd idea.

Given that the actual voting split is more likely 20:80 towards the “No” vote rather than 50:50, “No” voters have no motivation to steal papers and “Yes” voters would probably have to steal around a million of them…

Still, there’s nothing like a little fear-mongering to sell newspapers, no matter how absurd.

Hat Tip: Editing Teh Herald who spotted this nonsense way before me and correctly points out that the underlying article is mind-bogglingly boring.

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