Three Questions
Which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives? Who is the current Secretary of State? Who is Great Britain’s prime minister?
Only 18% of people answered all three of those questions correctly when they were posed in a survey by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
That so few people would get answer all three correctly sadly isn’t that surprising. We’ve seen surveys before suggesting most Americans can name more American Idol judges than rights guaranteed under the First Amendment.
The breakdown by news audience is fairly interesting, though. Regular readers of the New Yorker, The Atlantic and Harper’s Magazine did the best—nearly half of that group answered all three questions correctly. Following that grouping, a perfect score was obtained by 44% of regular listeners of National Public Radio (NPR), 43% of regular viewers of MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews” and 42% of the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes” audience. Thirty-four percent of “The Colbert Report” audience and 30% of “The Daily Show” audience got all three questions correct.
Bringing up the rear with only about 10% of the audience getting a perfect score: National Enquirer (no surprise), Access Hollywood (no surprise), and CBS News with Katie Couric (??). I think we now know why Palin thought she might be able to pull off a CBS interview a few weeks ago.
Read the whole list here. Obviously, shows with a heavy focus on politics produced better scores. But what’s interesting is, satirical comedy shows and the hyper-partisan shows they parody (I’m looking at you, O’Reilly), tend to have better-informed audiences than a lot of supposedly serious news programs and newspapers. What does that say about today’s news journalism?
Cross-posted at Ablogistan.
9 Responses to “Three Questions”
NPR being high on the list doesn't surprise me, but overall the US is in an embarrassing position. Heck, I have a dog that can probably score higher than most of those people.
I wonder how many TMV readers would get 100%? I had to think a second before Brownpopped up, the other two are no problem.
Same, Gordon Brown tripped me up for a sec since I've been so accustomed to blurting out Tony Blair! Luckily I heard his name plenty last week on Bloomberg. Other two were not really an issue.
Give me a map and I can tell you where bunches of countries are too, oooh!
I demand a cookie for being so smart though.
America the Incurious. We're a Christian Nation dontcha know ( where it says everyone must follow Christ in the Constitution I have yet to find…)
better yet, who is President of Georgia?
Who is President of Pakistan?
Who is President of Russia? ( it's not Putin , though for all his puppeteering he may as well be)
Who is the supreme leader in Iran ( it's not Ahmenidinajad )?
I first drew readers' attention to this poll earlier this week.
A more broad reflection of the lack-of-knowledge problem that is honest would include consideration of qualifiation or even weighting of the suffrage. (Best of all, test scores multiplied by taxes paid or a suitable standard for this such as percentiles for the two.)
Stupid keyboard — Q U A L I F I C A T I O N (and weighting!) of the suffrage
The most frightening stat to come out of this study is not the composite score of 18%, but that only 53% were able to correctly identify the Democrats as the majority in the House. There are really only two choices, so a coin flip would have performed almost as well as the American public.
Digging deeper: Of the 40 categories of “Regular Audiences,” only 9 categories scored 53% or lower on the House question. The split does not indicate that a majority of Americans fall into those categories, but that there were enough wrong answers in those 9 categories to outweigh many of the correct answers in the other 31 categories.
I'd love to see a breakdown of the readership/audience categories — what % of those surveyed do not keep up with political news in any way?
I don't get the chance to (and don't choose to) listen to Hannity on the radio much, but once in a while (it may have been every Thursday at one time), the Hannity show would do a “man on the street” (person on the street) live-mike show where various people, usually young people, would be asked questions like that. Many young people (gung-ho for Obama, “knowing” the Republicans are evil, and so on) cannot name the Vice President or the Secretary of State, and laugh stupidly when confronted about this (they don't believe it's important, anyway), when not stupidly interjecting the word “like” between every other word in their sentences or otherwise behaving illogically. (But they have no problem chanting “Obama! Obama!” as was demonstrated on that show this afternoon.) (At least they weren't asked to recall a past event and weren't given the chance to stupidly describe the past in present tense, or have every other be “uh” or “um” as often on NPR's radio shows, where an “expert” on such word [mis]use claimed that those who don't engage in that kind of additional diction are uneducated[!].)