April 15, 2007

Pew Survey looks at Americans’…

…knowledge of the news
By Joshua Holland
Posted on April 16, 2007, Printed on April 16, 2007

Coverage of the latest Pew poll on Americans’ media consumption and knowledge of current events will no doubt feature much hand-wringing over the fact that viewers of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report are much more knowledgeable about current events than viewers of Fox News, although I’m not sure why that would be a surprise to anyone.

And the “reality based community” shouldn’t take too much comfort in that fact, given that Comedy Central viewers only scored slightly higher than Bill O’Reilly’s septuagenarian audience, and NPR listeners knew as much as Rush Limbaugh fans.

And of course there are the usual punch-lines about how stunningly ignorant Americans are of the world around them: only slightly more than a third could name Russian president Vladimir Putin; fewer than one in five know who the Senate Majority leader is and three out of ten can’t name the Vice President, even after six news-packed, controversial years in office (fewer can name Darth Cheney today than were able to identify the bumbling Dan Quayle in 1989).

The question that should be asked, but probably won’t be, is why Americans are so out of touch with politics. It’s a much-debated question, but the easy answer is that they’re divorced from the workings of their large and remote DC-based government; they feel they have no power to change the status quo in any way and that feeling, more than anything, leaves way too many of them disinterested in the specifics of exactly who’s screwing them and how. (I’ve written about it before, in the context of corruption.)

I personally believe that this is the result of a more-or-less intentional campaign to convince people of their supposed powerlessness, and every time I hear someone say of politicians, “they’re all the same” or ask “what’s the difference?” I think to myself: ‘that right there is a huge a win for the plutocracy.’

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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Speaking for one American (me) it’s not that we think we can’t make a difference, it’s that finding information we can trust is nearly impossible. The media has so distorted my understanding/view of politics that I simply can’t be bothered. That’s not to say it’s a good solution, but at this point, I’m unsure how we can ever clean up the mess that’s been made. So much for “if you see it in the ‘Sun’, it’s so” …

I’d like to see poll results for Europeans, and see how much smarter they supposedly are.

Commander Ikari

April 17, 2007

Or think they are. I dont doubt they are more inclined politically… but how much is really their view and how much is fed to them? I DOUBT that’s just the American media.

LV: Who is the “they” you are refering to? If it’s the Colbert/Daily Show viewers, then I could say the same about Fox viewers. How much of their views are influenced by what they watch? Can’t speak for the rest of Europe, but over here in Britain, while the newspapers tend to lean one way or the other politically, the TV channels tend to be balanced.

You could, but I mean collectively the media. I wasnt pointing fingers at anyone specifically, and last place I would point is a self-declaired comedy show. And while I cant speak for TV programming in Europe, I can speak for what Ive seen/read on Routers (which seems to be a very popular one)… VERY slanted.

I tend to listen to the news and then make my own decision about what is actually happening. A bit of a conspiracy theorist in that way, I guess. I do love Daily Show, though. 🙂