Today, Explained - Why newspapers fired Dilbert

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

Newspapers across the country pulled the long-running comic “Dilbert” after its creator uploaded a racist tirade about Rasmussen poll results. Journalist Chris Cillizza explains how providing the fodder for controversy is Rasmussen’s whole deal. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Well, Rasmussen Poll had a provocative little poll today. They said, do you agree or disagree with the statement, it's okay to be white? It feels like bait as much as it is a question, and Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, took it. 47% of Black respondents were not willing to say it's okay to be white. That actually, that's like a real poll. It is a real poll. Coming up, we'll ask whether you can trust it. And look at a man... As you know, I've been identifying as Black for a while, years now. Whose politics took a turn during the Trump presidency, who questioned the Holocaust's

death toll, who last year introduced his first black character, a man who identified as white, who took the bait on a profoundly stupid and arguably racist poll, and whose strip has now been dropped by hundreds of newspapers. Talk about disasters. That's coming up on Today Explained.

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Michael Kavna is an arts reporter for The Washington Post, and he is a syndicated cartoonist himself. His strip is called Warped. So he's very familiar with both Scott Adams and Dilbert. Dilbert was launched in 1989. And the reason it quickly entered the zeitgeist, it arose out of 90s office cubicle culture and this almost dehumanizing hamster-like culture

of cubicles that added to the sense that maybe, you know, we were sort of sometimes felt like rats in a maze. And, you know, it was coming out of Scott's experience. Scott Adams had worked at Pac Bell and elsewhere. And so he was used to Silicon Valley. He was used to the tech world. And he has spoken about his own frustrations. And out of that, he created Dilbert.

The moment you realize that your efforts and your outcomes are not related, it really frees up your schedule. tide office drone who, you know, has intelligence but yet is being managed by people in a system that will drive you crazy if you let it. Dilbert, find out what the users want before you build it. Why are you explaining my job to me as if I'm an idiot? It's called managing. I assume you're dumb because you work harder than I do and earn less money. Dilbert became the comic of the 90s, the fastest rising comic. Dilbert really spanned that decade because it spoke to so many people. It was the comic strip that you would see

push pinned onto cubicle walls as sort of the corporate culture was changing. We needed humor to survive that time. And Scott hit it perfectly. You went from Scott being in, you know, not that many papers in 1989 to by the end of the decade, Dilbert was plastered on every date book and calendar

and every office product back in an era when we all weren't living on our phone. What do we know about what motivated him early on? I was getting up at 4 a.m., drawing for a few hours, going to work, and then coming home and drawing and finishing the drawing for the rest of the night. He has told me that, you know, he wasn't an artist per se himself, but he knew that comic strips had changed enough where if you could bring the humor and you could

bring the very topical satire that you didn't necessarily have to be the best artist in an era of shrinking comic strips. We also saw where comic strips could succeed on the humor and having the characters look iconic, meaning precise, simple lines that are easy for the reader to recognize, remember, give a distinctive trait like Dilbert's upturned tie. So Scott actually created a style that could be quickly reproduced and quickly rendered. And he struck me as highly analytical and strategic about the comics business, bringing in MBAs savvy to how to succeed in this very specific field. And he was bringing innovation in a field that, in many of its habits, was a throwback. I had email before the public had email.

So I put my email address in the margins of the strip, which was revolutionary at the time. Sounds funny now, but nobody had email then. But the people who did have email, I mean, there were some, all wrote to me. And then in 2015 and 2016, he started getting a lot of public attention for his politics. What I saw in Trump was someone who was highly trained, and that a lot of the things that the media were reporting as sort of random insults and bluster and just Trump being Trump looked to me like a lot of deep technique that I recognized from the fields of hypnosis and persuasion. What was going on? What happened?

What Scott told me was that he'd studied hypnotism, he had dabbled in understanding things like confirmation bias, and he struck me as very fascinated about leaders and power and control and what are the techniques to, you know, sort of appeal or influence the masses. There's something that I call the linguistic kill shot. And what that is, is a engineered set of words that essentially changes an argument or ends it so decisively, I call it a kill shot. So what he seemed especially fascinated about was President Trump. And what Scott Adams told me at the time was he predicted an electoral victory for Trump

because he believed Trump could speak to people, knew his audience, and knew how to motivate them in a way that no other politician was doing. The key thing to note here is if you listened to Scott's podcast and then you read his Dilbert strips concurrently, the Venn diagram was becoming a pure circle. His comic strips, some would say his characters were becoming a cipher for his direct opinions. At this point, obviously, Scott had already had a personal income in the millions. But why risk that to start openly, you know, getting into political opinions? And what he told me was just he was having more fun than he had in a long time, and it was the most enjoyable year. He also cited to me, he said,

look, this is already costing me income. Already what we saw from him when he was declaring was, I'm willing to lose money in order to be a political voice and not just a satiric comic voice. Michael, tell me about the YouTube video. Scott Adams has a YouTube show called Real Coffee with Scott Adams, where he lifts the mug and takes a simultaneous sip and speaks to thousands of viewers and citing this Rasmussen poll, which I'll side note, even Scott

Adams told me, texted me last Saturday to say it was fair to question the data of the Rasmussen poll. So not even Scott Adams is attesting to the credibility of the poll he cited. But based on this poll, Scott said last week that black Americans are part of a hate group, quote unquote. So if nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people, according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll, that's a hate group. And he said as a result, he was urging white people to, quote, get the hell away from black people.

The best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people. Just get the f*** away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this. This didn't come across like a malapropism. This wasn't a verbal gaffe. This came across as a very tactical conversation. On Saturday, Scott went on the show Hotep Jesus, and he said, look, I never do anything for just one reason. I would be surprised if I'm in business a few days from now. So here's the things you can know it isn't. I wouldn't do it just for laughs.

I mean, it isn't that funny. It's pretty funny, but it isn't that funny. I wouldn't do it for money. I wouldn't do it for reputation. Why would I do it? I texted Scott in my reporting on Saturday and said, what is your current client list? He said, by Monday around zero, which lets you know there was a degree of anticipation about all of this. And I've heard from people in the comics industry who have said to me, why does one choose to self-immolate? I talked to one of the most prominent black voices on the comics page, Rob Armstrong, who he produces the comic strip Jumpstart, which is about a black family set in Philadelphia. And you'll probably hear more from it soon because it's in development at CBS as a TV show.

Rob considered Scott a friend to the point where last week when a friend told him this, Rob didn't believe it. He thought it was a prank till he watched it. And Rob was shocked. He couldn't believe this was the same person. He said it broke his heart. It Rob was shocked. He couldn't believe this was the same person. He said it broke his heart. It just really hurt. He said he shed a few tears. And then he thought to think

that someone who is your friend is, quote, now a heartless, soulless racist was just very hard to believe. And he said, well, all I know now is I won't be inviting him to my TV wrap party. How big a deal is this for cartoonists like yourself and others who work with and know Scott Adams? It is a big deal because Dilbert is one of the biggest strips that reaches back to what we often call the monoculture. Dilbert is one of the few strips that transcends comics where people who aren't comics readers have heard of Dilbert. And so part of the reason it's a big deal

is because you had one of the most iconic strips, certainly in the 90s, seemingly going away overnight. The second part of that, too, is the space, newspaper comic space. It is such limited real estate. And one thing that most people in the comics industry want to see is new voices. And this provides an opportunity, actually, perhaps ironically, for more diverse voices to get on what in some cities is a very staid comics page. And so it will be fascinating to see going forward what kind of new voices, you know, young voices from different kinds of experience,

underrepresented worlds of experience. Wouldn't that be like the ultimate irony if a new star or two emerges in comics as a result of this. Reporter and cartoonist Michael Kavna. Coming up, why was a polling firm asking people if it's okay to be white? Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter.

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. We're back with Chris Saliza, formerly of CNN and The Washington Post. Chris is now an independent journalist, and he covers and has long covered politics. Chris, Scott Adams is in trouble for fixating on this poll from Rasmussen Reports that asked people, do you agree or disagree with the statement, it's okay to be white?

Now, if you think about that question for more than five seconds, it is a weird thing to ask people. Why was a polling firm asking people if it's okay to be white. Now, if you think about that question for more than five seconds, it is a weird thing to ask people. Why was a polling firm asking people if it's okay to be white? It's a really weird thing to ask people. And to be honest, I haven't heard a good explanation for why. The best explanation that people at the firm have given is, well, it's something in the news, which I mean, I guess race is generally speaking in the news. But I would say that asking a question like that is problematic for a couple reasons. One, it's OK to be white is a white nationalist sentiment that was picked up in the mid 2000s by white supremacist groups. Unite the right leader, Jason Kessler, pushing for what he calls white civil rights. It's okay to be white.

White lives matter, too. It began sort of as a trolling effort on a message board called 4chan. It transformed into people posting messages at college campuses with the phrase, it's okay to be white. So to the extent that you're using a phrase that is associated, at least in some people's mind, with white nationalist groups, it's problematic. I think the other thing that's really worth noting is what is okay with being white mean, right?

There's a lot of vagueness in that. It's not, do you like white people? Do you hate white people? Are you friends with white people? Are you enemies like white people? Do you hate white people? Are you friends with white people? Are you enemies with white people? Are you okay with white people? Is just a very odd choice of words and phrasing and one that I think creates a lot of uncertainty in the mind of the person taking the poll, which I think questions the results.

You spent a lot of years covering politics and campaigns, and so you are very familiar with polling. So let's talk about what Rasmussen Reports actually is. Who are these folks? So, you know, I think the answer to that is twofold. In the early 2000s, Rasmussen Reports was a polling firm that did something called automated dialing polling. Typically, what people are familiar with is a poll in which a live, an actual person calls you and says, do you have 10 minutes of your time? I'd like to ask you a few questions. That's called a live response poll. Automated dial polls are where an automated voice calls and says, I have a poll. Please press one if you are for Donald Trump. Please press two if you're for Joe

Biden. The appeal of those polls from the pollster's perspective is they're much cheaper. An automated voice is a lot cheaper than paying an actual person to conduct the poll. So Rasmussen was on the leading edge of conducting these automated dialing polls. It was run by a guy named Scott Rasmussen. He had done polling in the past. It was always seen as a little more favorable in its results toward Republicans than toward Democrats. You know, I would say within the bounds of reality, it would never have something that was you would say, oh, my gosh, like that's definitely wrong. What I would say in the last few years, and I know that Scott Rasmussen left the company in 2013, it's transformed itself more into sort of a right wing talking points creator than it is a pollster. Yes, they do still conduct polling,

but you know, they also do things like they seem to be backing the idea of election fraud during the 2020 election. If you're in the business of exposing media gaslighting like we are, there is no more fertile field than cheating in elections. If you question elections, I think you'll find that you're not alone. It appears to be more advocacy than it is strict polling. It now feels as though they're in the business of sort of creating content for Fox News' primetime hosts to talk about. A new Rasmussen poll just came out just a very short while ago, and it has our approval rating at 55 percent and going up. Now, immediately after the president was touting this Rasmussen poll, a lot of folks are saying, yeah, but all the other polls have you way down and you're still pathetic and we still think you're a loser and we don't even know why you're breathing.

They didn't say that, but they came very close, more or less dismissing a poll that's been largely accurate. But, you know, I think they are into provocative questions that provoke controversy. I think that's part of the business model. And indeed, know, I think they are into provocative questions that provoke controversy. I think that's part of the business model. And indeed, look, we're talking about Rasmussen research here today. That's not typically, you know, not typically a subject that I'm talking on a daily basis about. Right. So in a way, a lot more people are going to hear about who they are, look up their website. And, you know, I hate to say it, but that's probably a win for them. Let me ask you, you worked for, you know, the big politics heavy hitters in media.

Does CNN, for example, does the Washington Post, do they take Rasmussen polling seriously? No. I shouldn't say they don't take it seriously. I would say they don't report that polling. Both of those places have polling units run by a pollster and usually a deputy that have a set of internal standards that polls have to meet in order for the organization to report on them. I think that's become increasingly important as more and more pollsters have flooded the

market. It's become cheaper to do these automated dial polls. As a result, there's more data out there than ever before, and I would suggest more bad data. But all of these polling units have internal standards in polls that they accept and polls that they don't report. Rasmussen's head of polling said in a video earlier this week, we have a 20-year track record of top-tier accuracy, and we predicted both a Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden popular vote win. But people who don't want to address the content of our polling call us pro-Trump because back in 2016, we were one of the few who didn't have Hillary Clinton up by double digits. In a sense saying, we've been right a lot of the time.

Are there many instances really where their results are meaningfully different from other pollsters? There are plenty of instances in which their results are meaningfully different from other pollsters? There are plenty of instances in which their results are meaningfully different from other pollsters. I would say that the claim that they were right about 2016, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, etc., is one of those things that you hear in the after action report from a lot of political people. I always say, you know, after the 2016 election, everybody knew Donald Trump was going to win. Before the 2016 election, no one knew Donald Trump was going to win. Everybody sort of writes their own story after the fact of how they knew it at the time. Rasmussen isn't alone.

But this idea that they were always right and that's why people are out to get them, again, I think is a little far-fetched. I've seen some people on Twitter say, OK, Scott Adams is a nut job. He's a racist. But also, wow, look at the number of people saying it's not OK to be white. How much weight should we actually give to the results of this poll? It's a great question that I struggle to give you a definitive answer to if I'm being candid.

I do think when you have a question that does use language that has been associated in the past with white supremacists and white nationalists, I think that that can bias the response. You know, I think if an African-American person has heard that phrase and sort of recognizes that tie to white supremacists, I think that that can really compromise getting an objective result on race relations in this country. I don't want to lay this all at the feet of Rasmussen. I think part of the problem here is Scott Adams, right? Scott Adams takes those numbers and says, black people hate white people. We need to live apart. Like Rasmussen didn't say that in their defense, right? They asked a question, which again, I think is flawed as a question, but they didn't draw that conclusion.

They did not say, here is a definitive look at how the races regard one another in the United States. I'd like to see more mainstream polling organizations ask carefully constructed questions about race, and I just don't think that fits into it for us to draw a conclusion about what the sort of the big takeaway is from a question like that. Does this speak to a larger problem with polling in general? Polling's been under attack for what, 10 years now? How much of this is about Rasmussen? And how much of this is when an American hears, oh, this poll showed us X, Y, and Z, we actually really just need to be skeptical. I would say it's 25% Rasmussen,

75% we need to be skeptical. And by the way, that's not to take away blame from Rasmussen. I think it was a poorly, I want to be absolutely clear, I think it was a poorly worded question. They should have known that that language has been used by white supremacists in the past, and that's going to bias the question, period. That said, I think the rise of pollsters, and there really has just been an absolute boom time for pollsters over the last decade, has produced so many numbers that our natural human tendency is to look at a number and say, well, this must be true. 42% of people said it, right? It feels like certainty. When you see the number, it feels like, well, this is be true. 42% of people said it, right? It feels like certainty. When you see the number, it feels like, well, this is a specific number. I always joke when pollsters,

they do like 42.15% feel this way. It's like, come on, like we are projecting a level of specificity and sort of nailed it, finger on the nose accuracy that is just not borne out by the data. It's art and science. It's not just science. It's not math. It's not just two plus two equals four. How you decide what the people who you're going to poll look like, what percentage of African-Americans, what percentage of white voters, what percentage of women, what percentage of men. And are you projecting for today? Are you projecting for an election in the future? How are you arriving at those predictions? My first job in Washington, I worked for Charlie Cook, who ran a political handicapping site called the Cook Political Report.

And he told me, and I still think of this, don't take any one poll. Look at the sort of general directional movement on a bunch of polls. So if you see five polls that all seem to suggest Joe Biden's approval rating is moving upward, well, then it's his approval rating is probably moving upward. If you see one poll that has his approval rating at 55 and all the other polls have it at 42, it's more likely it's in the low 40s than it's in the high 50s. So I wish how we consume polling that we would consume it more in the aggregate as opposed to what I think happens, which is cherry picking a number here, cherry picking a number there, that backs up a pre-existing point of belief that you have or to make a point that you want to make, rather than looking at the data and saying, OK, what does it actually show us? That was independent journalist Chris Saliza. Today's show was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and edited by Amina El-Sadi.

It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.