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.