When Seeing Isn't Believing

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

Were Iranian troops still loyal to the Shah, and would they fire on their own people? When the Shah left, the answers weren't clear. But in Tehran these days, the way to make your point is to demonstrate, preferably in front of cameras. And, so reported the New York Times nervously, about 80 soldiers in gas masks "advanced toward the correspondents, stabbing the air with their bayonets." This press demonstration by the Immortals Brigade of the Imperial Guard was organized by one Amir-Sadeghi, who then said of the Ayatullah Khomeini, "We'll chop him up for dog meat--or maybe use him for target practice." Amir-Sadeghi was characterized by the Times as "the first person to give foreign correspondents accurate information about the Shah's plan to leave Iran"--and less generously by the Washington Post as "the son of the Shah's former chauffeur and a young man much given to verbal exaggeration."

The news out of Iran has been like that: rarely has reporting from anywhere been so tentative. Dispatches are full of "Little is known about . " "A day of contradictory developments ..." "Other sources gave a slightly different account ..." "How many civilians harbor such feelings is impossible to say since many keep their views to themselves." Only when Ramsey Clark after a short visit, proclaimed that 99% of the people were behind Khomeini did the New York Times's R.W. Apple Jr. commit himself to a "conservative guess" that at least 15% to 20% of Iranians were antagonistic or indifferent to the Ayatullah.

In the current situation, even seeing isn't believing, as all television viewers know who saw and heard the Ayatullah's "spokesman" address the cameras only to have everything he said repudiated by the old man the next day On the eve of Khomeini's return to Tehran, the New York Times admitted all in a frontpage headline: AYATULLAH, THE SYMBOL OF REVOLT, ELUDES DEFINITION.

The Iran story is a textbook example of why it is necessary to weigh on different scales what reporters say and what columnist-pundits do. A columnist is usually admired for the vigor of his opinions and regarded as wishy-washy if he does too much on-the-other-handing. In Iran, where so much is happening but so little is conclusive, a reporter who must return to the same story day after day just hopes events haven't undone what he has just written. His ambition is a humbler one: to describe confusion lucidly, and to allow a comfortable margin for the unknown.

CBS News does think it clearly knows how Americans feel about President Carter's recognition of Communist China--he hasn't got a majority behind him. Just before Teng Hsiao-p'ing's visit, the CBS News-New York Times poll telephoned 1,500 American homes and asked, "Do you think Jimmy Carter should have pushed for closer ties with Communist China even though that meant breaking off relations with the Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan?" With the question put that way, only 32% said yes, another 22% had no opinion and 46% disapproved. Is this America speaking?

By now everybody seems resigned to the melancholy fact that a mere 1,500 Americans--carefully balanced by region, then weighted by race, sex, age and education--can reasonably forecast how all Americans will vote for President Warren Mitofsky, who runs the CBS poll, claims to have predicted only one election wrong in twelve years. He snorts at what seems an obvious and disturbing inference--that it's hard to speak of independent opinions independently arrived at, if, without asking a whole country, its responses can be anticipated on the basis of so small a sample. According to statistical theory, says Mitofsky the results of his question about Communist China would "differ by no more than three percentage points in either direction from what would have been obtained by interviewing all adult Americans." It's easy to test that 3% margin precisely at election time, which is why pollsters are so nervous about their voting predictions. But when the question is a more nebulous one about policies or beliefs, in which the wording can greatly alter the results, how valuable and how accurate are 1,500 answers as a reflection of what all America thinks? The figure of 22% with no opinion on the question doesn't seem high to Mitofsky "because people don't seem to care about foreign policy these days." But had they been asked, some might have explained their don't-knows by saying, "Depends on how Peking behaves, depends how much we stick by Taiwan, depends on a lot of things." Maybe that's the sort of thing the German mathematician C.F. Gauss was thinking about when he spoke of "meaningless precision in numerical studies."

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