The Pew Organization has published its latest report comparing what people know today versus 20 years ago. The report says that the emergence of 24-hour news channels and the internet hasn't improved Americans' knowledge.
On average, today's citizens are about as able to name their leaders, and are about as aware of major news events, as was the public nearly 20 years ago. The new survey includes nine questions that are either identical or roughly comparable to questions asked in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 2007, somewhat fewer were able to name their governor, the vice president, and the president of Russia, but more respondents than in the earlier era gave correct answers to questions pertaining to national politics.
The difference, of course, is that fewer people are getting their news from the same source and that more people get their news from a larger variety of sources. The greatest determinant of knowledge was wealth.
More affluent Americans also are disproportionately represented in the high-knowledge group, a difference that held even after level of schooling, age, gender and race were taken into consideration in the analysis. A clear majority (55%) of those with household incomes of $100,000 or more are among the third of the sample that knew the most, compared with just 14% of those with household incomes of $20,000 or less.
This doesn't surprise me a bit, given that the more money you make, the more the government meddles in your life and tries to take what you've earned. Those people are more likely to be interested in local, national, and world events because they feel both more directly affected and more in control of their lives.
But the kicker comes in which news outlets' viewers are best informed.
Overall, 35% of the public was classified as having a high level of knowledge - on average, 18 correct answers out of the 23 total questions. Half or more of the audiences for six media sources scored this high: the comedy news shows and major newspaper websites (54% in the high knowledge group), the NewsHour (53%), National Public Radio (51%) and Rush Limbaugh's radio show (50%). Regular readers of news magazines were not far behind (48%).
By contrast, the regular audiences for many other sources scored no higher than the sample average. The audiences for morning news (34% high knowledge), local TV news (35%), Fox News Channel (35%), blogs (37%), and the network evening news (38%) were not significantly different from the norm for the whole sample (35%). The audiences for CNN, internet news sites such as Google and Yahoo, local newspapers, and TV news organization websites scored slightly higher (41%-44% high knowledge).
In other words, people who watch the Daily Show, listen to Rush Limbaugh, and watch FOX News are still better informed.
Interestingly, this isn't the way the survey is portrayed by the lefties.
Ezra Klein:
The new Pew Poll on public knowledge of current affairs includes the sadly routine finding that Fox News is doing a remarkable amount of nothing for its viewing audience. Subjected to 35 questions about the news, regular viewers of Fox scored directly in the national average, showing no sign of enhanced knowledge for all the time spent before Brit Hume. Blogs, too, appeared to do little good for their audience, lifting scores by only 2%. The Daily Show and Colbert Report either attract or educated the most informed viewers, along with newspaper websites, PBS, NPR, Limbaugh, and O'Reilly. Maybe none of this should be surprising, though. In the end, Fox News doesn't exist to inform -- it exists to convince. And in that, it's doing just fine.
It's no wonder the blogs aren't doing so well if this post is any example. Klein can't even get the facts straight about what the study says.
More obfuscation, this time from Think Progress:
A new study by the Pew Research Study shows that viewers of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report have the highest knowledge of national and international affairs, while Fox News viewers rank nearly dead last.
As I tried to point out in the comments of this post, that's not exactly what the survey found. What it found is that of the best informed Americans, those who watched the Daily Show and listened to Rush Limbaugh were better informed than those who watched FOX News. And even though ThinkProgress is loathe to point this out, CNN watchers did only slightly better and MSNBC's non-existent audience isn't even calculated. And for all that Keith Olbermann thinks Bill O'Reilly is a big liar, O'Reilly's audience seemed fairly well-informed, while the study couldn't even list an audience for Olbermann (well, I guess four people don't make a statistical difference).
At the Carpetbagger Report, they couldn't even be bothered to link to the actual study, but instead took the New York Times' word for what the report said. Which, of course, wasn't exactly accurate.
But here’s one big difference: the survey respondents who seemed to know the most about what’s going on — who were able to identify major public figures, for example — were likely to be viewers of fake news programs like Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”; those who knew the least watched network morning news programs, Fox News or local television news.
Well, no, that's not what the survey said. The survey said that those who watched network morning news programs, FOX News or local television news had about average scores. But don't expect the NYT or their sycophants on the Left to get it right, even when the survey results are so readily available.
The most important--and probably the most overlooked--point of the survey is that the best informed people, besides being wealthy, used multiple sources for news and information.
The audiences for sources such as major TV news websites, the comedy shows, or the O'Reilly Factor tend to be fairly omnivorous in their media consumption - an average of more than seven separate sources for the regular audiences of each of these, compared with the overall average of 4.6 sources. Well-informed people do gravitate to particular places, but they also make use of a much wider range of news sources than do the less informed.
Getting your news only from one source is stupid and short-sighted. There are far too many outlets available to only get your information from The View.
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