The Pew Research Center is offering an online news quiz aimed at gauging how news savvy the (American) public is. I think most people plugged into the daily news cycle — particularly the U.S. news cycle — should do pretty well.
You can compare your online results to those of “1,003 randomly sampled adults [who were] asked the same questions in a recent national survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.” Those results are nasty-bad.
The only one of the 12 questions that came close to being answered correctly across the board was celeb-related. The question? “What is the name of the talk show host who has campaigned for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama?”
Yes, it’s Oprah. But you knew that, didn’t you?
Most people didn’t know, though, that:
Harry Reid is the current Senate majority leader
Ben Bernancke is the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board
Venezuela is the country Hugo Chavez calls home
And I’m guessing it’s primarily because they’re not exactly celeb-friendly names or subjects. So much of our news consumption has devolved to TMZ-level tripe that it sometimes seems futile to rely on the electorate being “informed.”
When I was at MSN, I used to rail that the home page of the most popular site in the country was full of bubblegum stories and fluff. This is why.
The only question I have: were we giving people what they wanted, or shaping that want? Or both?
Check out this incredibly cool and effective interactive from the NYTimes. Despite the cuts and creakiness, The Grey Lady still does a lot of things well:
For me, it’s the actual animation that makes all the difference. The graph does a superb job of showing broad demographic shifts in a way that static graphics (and certainly text) can never do.
Not quite in the ‘hilarious’ category, but Radar Online has devoted one of its trademark top lists to the questionable morality of baseball players.
This stuff is like online Cheesies.. bad for you, but you can stop eating them. And then you have to figure out what to do with those disgusting orange fingers…
It’s been the top story on most news sites all day, including BBC and CNN, and it’s not over yet. Video of CSIS’ interrogation of Omar Khadr in Gitmo has certainly captured the attention of the country. It’s at turns boring, dramatic, pathetic, and ultimately inconclusive, despite what his defence team says. Here’s the first excerpt from CBC News:
My guess is the video — and bear in mind there are more than seven hours of additional footage being released as I type — will be used to suit either side’s purpose.
Moonbats will, of course, seize on this to prove Khadr is just an abused child who’s suffered at the hands of the savage Americans. Those on the other side of the pendulum will say it shows a manipulative and well-cared-for terrorist who just happened to get caught.
