Often, scandal content consumers and producers are one and the same.

Conducting a methodologically sound public opinion survey takes time — more time, perhaps, than the evanescent contrivances that satisfy outrage addicts on social media allow. So, put today’s headlines aside as we traverse the annals of fake summer scandals, all the way back to when the arbiters of cultural discourse pretended to summon vast wells of passion over an advertisement for pants.

For those of you who still care about Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad, we now have some solid data about your cohort via The Economist/YouGov. In an August 9-11 poll of American adults, YouGov found that a plurality expressed admirable ambivalence about the online controversy surrounding the advert. When asked if the ad was either clever (because it was probably the most inadvertently successful spot for pants in the history of pants) or offensive (because it was somehow evocative of Nazi eugenics), 48 percent said it was “neither” or confessed they weren’t sure. To the degree that these passionless responses suffice for disinterest, I’ll take it.

But some do care. Thirty-nine percent called it “clever.” Just 12 percent said the ad was “offensive,” including 17 percent of women and 20 percent of self-identified “liberals” — the largest subgroup to register dissatisfaction with the advertisement. Among young people between the ages of 18 and 29, the target audience for highly abstracted anti-Sweeney deconstructionism, just 12 percent said the ad rubbed them the wrong way. A plurality called it “clever.” Forty-two percent didn’t know or didn’t care.

These data suggest that there isn’t much of an audience for the campaign devoted to anathematizing Sweeney, American Eagle, blue jeans, and the very concept of genetic heritage. But not every pollster agrees.

On Wednesday morning, Axios applied a defibrillator to this lifeless scandal with its own poll in partnership with Generation Lab, which purportedly found far more agreement among young people with the claim that the advertisement laundered Rassenhygiene into the national dialogue.

That survey found that only 32 percent of young people felt “positively” about the ad. Thirty-six percent reacted “negatively.” Asked for the emotion that the ad invoked, 41 percent said “indifferent,” but another 41 percent said “uncomfortable.” Behind that, 26 percent expressed confusion. Another 27 percent were “annoyed.” Majorities said the ad came off as inauthentic, not relatable, “overly sexualized,” out of touch, and disempowering. And while just 10 percent said the ad was explicitly designed to popularize “genetic superiority,” a similarly infinitesimal 6 percent found the ad appealing enough to make them more likely to purchase American Eagle’s product.

If you think that’s bad, you should see the numbers when Generation Lab broke down its sample by gender — male, female, and “nonbinary or other,” in a weighted sample of just 40 out of 1,289 respondents. On the Sweeney issue, there is a traditional gender gap, but it pales in comparison to the no-gender gap.

In this group, 58 percent felt negatively toward the ad. Precisely no one felt “excited” or “inspired” by it. Sixty-five percent were made “uncomfortable” by it. Zero percent said it was “authentic” and “relatable,” and no one disagreed with the notion that the spot was too erotic. All non-binary respondents found it out of touch to one degree or another, and no one said the spot made them more likely to buy AE jeans.

So, who exactly did Generation Lab poll? Axios confesses that the pollster drew a “representative sample” from “undergraduate and graduate students nationwide.” That’s exactly what you would expect the audience would be for a highly theoretical, pseudo-intellectual thought experiment in which Americans were asked to ponder how the ad would have been any different if it had been directed by Leni Riefenstahl.

Axios insisted that the ad opened a great chasm among young people, based largely around their partisan affiliations, sparking “debates over ‘wokeness,’ beauty standards and race.” In fact, it sparked a debate among the roughly 18 million Americans who are currently matriculated, most of whom are between 18 and 24. That’s who is driving this discourse, and that’s who this summer scandal is packaged for — at least, it was until the whole enterprise backfired, and the New York Times insisted that it was only Republicans that ever cared about or participated in the conversation around the blue jeans. It’s no coincidence that this educational cohort is likely to be overrepresented in the nation’s newsrooms and media companies.

So, the next time you encounter an inflamed cultural sore spot on which national media fixates, a controversy that doubles as an opportunity to demonstrate the breadth of one’s experience in formal education, ask yourself who the audience is. Often, scandal content consumers and producers are one and the same.