American public no better informed today than two decades ago.

[Stevepol]

The Atlantic magazine for July/Aug 07 (pg 30) reviews a Pew Research Center study that says that "the American public is no better informed than it was before round-the-clock cable news and the Internet invaded our homes." They studied 1,500 Americans to find out "where they got their information and how much they know about current affairs."

They found the "the most knowledgeable Americans were those who got their news from the web sites of major papers and those who watched programs like THE COLBERT REPORT or THE DAILY SHOW; they correctly answered 54% of the questions about current affairs, WHILE REGULAR VIEWERS OF LOCAL NEWS AND NETWORK MORNING SHOWS GOT ONLY ABOUT 35% RIGHT."
Why does this not surprise me?

They didn't go into the success rate for Fox Noise viewers. Undoubtedly, the Fox viewer would have been a smaller percentage of the 35% above, maybe they got about 15% of their answers right. But what the hey, as long as I have a strong opinion and can bully the guy I'm talking with, what does it matter. I'll believe anything I damned well pleased, as long as my revered and all-wise Fox Noise tells me it's so. If they had asked about readers of DU, my guess is DU folks got about 70% of the questions right and the DU-ers that got some questions wrong did so in many cases probably because the people making out the questions didn't know what they were talking about.

[damntexdem]

1. Well, they couldn't measure the Faux News viewers bec ause ...

their percentages didn't extend into the negative range.

[MisterP]

2. I think this is the Pew article:

http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=319
do you have a link for the Atlantic story--even if it's subscription-only

[Stevepol]

3. I saw it in a hard copy of the mag, a short insert about 5 paragraphs or so on pg 30.

Sorry no link. Just a short review of the Pew study in the mag, not a full-scale article.