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?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Cold Air, News, Pew Centre
At first glance this kind of thing seems like a distraction, but it’s actually almost subversive in the way it reminds us how poorly informed we are as a nation, even in such a big news year. Not good when selecting the next president of the United States!!
Thanks for posting.
Martin