American Public Knowledge Gap on Hard News/Foreign Affairs (recent study)

[chill_wind]

vs domestic "soft news...". Not a big new revelation, just depressing.


"Approximately 2800 participants from Washingpost.com completed the survey along with 1700 members of the Politmetrix national panel."


Mind the Gap
Differences in Public Knowledge about Domestic and Overseas Events

By Shanto Iyengar and Richard Morin
Wednesday, July 5, 2006; 4:24 PM

In this age of polling, hardly a day goes by without some new report about the state of American public opinion. But pollsters rarely acknowledge the well-documented finding in political science that citizens know little about current events in general and even less about overseas events. This so-called "knowledge gap" between domestic and international news was the subject of this study.

Explanations for the unwillingness of Americans citizens to live up to their civic responsibilities are many. One has to do with the supply and content of news. Driven by market pressures, news organizations across the globe are turning to more entertainment-centered forms of reporting, making it more difficult for lazy citizens to encounter substantive political information as a matter of course. An important consequence of the shift to "soft news" has been the scaling back of international bureaus and staff. Heavily "domesticated" news programming creates fewer opportunities for people to learn about overseas events. Even at the height of the Cold War, when international issues were front-page news, the American public displayed only superficial awareness of overseas events and foreign policy. In the post-Cold War era, despite massive increases in education and access to information, Americans continued to lag behind citizens of other industrialized democracies on measures of international affairs information. In 1994, for example, an eight-nation survey found that citizens of Mexico, Spain, Italy, Canada, Germany, Britain and France were more able than Americans to provide correct answers to a series of questions tapping foreign affairs. Whereas 37 percent of the American sample was unable to answer a single question, the comparable level of ignorance (averaged) for Italy, France, Britain, Germany and Canada was 19 percent.

Read the summary of highlights at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/05/AR2006070501144.html

[flyarm]

1. this one is the killer:Whereas 37 percent of the American sample

was unable to answer a single question


and i know why..i have internet groups i send info to each and every day..i also earmark every republican i know and i send them info each and everyday..( they did not ask me to.. i just do it..

well i get asked by those rethug friends to take them off my lists..but i ginore their request.i figure if they read one thing ..once a week ..thats more than they are getting by our media..

but 2 weeks ago a friend and i went out to dinner for our birthdays..and she requested i take her off the list ..she said she finds herself.."wasting time" each day reading this stuff and she said she didn't have time for it..
so i then went into my normal..what are you talking about..you don't have time ? i said i thought you were American?? she said she was ..i said no you are not..not if you don't have time to at least know a little about what the guy you voted for is doing..

i said ..you are responsible for this..i asked her when she will be willing to take responsibility for what she has done to this nation??

she said..oh don't go into all this crap..i said ..crap??

i said well the policeman and firefighter and teachers and 52 yr old grandma of 6 ..didn't have time to go to iraq and fight this illegal war..but you know what ..they were sent by your guy *

and i said she had alot of nerve saying she didn't have time to know what is happening to them..when she has a full time maid..and three homes..and the soldiers are loosing their arms, legs and brains and lives ..and ..homes because of her voting for this "crap"..

she said enough already..and i said ..no..not enough already..i said the constitution that she lives under says "we the people"..i asked her when is she going to be one of those "we the people" and take responsibility for what she has done to this country..
by this time i was getting very loud and there was a huge bar next to us so everyone was listening to what i was saying..( and yes i knew they were listening..so i got even louder)

so she finally says..i don't care what this government is doing..as long as my family is safe and we have what we need to live by...

at that point i got up and i said i can no longer be friends..and that her legacy will be that she and people like her sat back and allowed this country to become a police state, and that she is part and parcel of a war criminal...

and i got up and began to leave..and honestly there were about 20 ppl sitting at the bar ( a very nice restaurant)..and people began clapping for me!! and people were stopping me and saying thank god there were people like me willing to stand up for whats right..

and folks .. i am on a resort island and a very republican island...

i was shocked so many were applauding me...

i have not seen my friend since..but i would say she had a different exit of the restaurant than i did !!

fly

[cally]

2. k & R

Here's the answer to why so many voted for the moron in chief.

[tanyev]

3. It's hard work keeping up with all the American Idol contestants.

No room left for any of that other stuff.

[LibDemAlways]

4. If it doesn't have to do with American Idol or

sports, forget it. Every night the three major networks provide a half hour (20 minutes if you don't count the commercials) summary of national and world events - and the last few stories are usually filler. As people in the tv broascast world will tell you "news skews old" meaning the audience is not the youthful demographic advertisers lust over. And with republican corporate control, it's mostly rw talking points regurgitated anyway. Following the "news" two of the three network affiliates in LA run one solid hour of Access Hollywood, The Insider, Extra - all Hollywood pap designed to distract the masses.

As for print journalism, I gave up the LA Times five years ago when I became enraged over their juxtaposition of a fawning portrait of Laura Bush on the same page with a disgusting hatchet job on Hillary. The rag has only gone downhill since, and now makes no effort to hide its bias.

When I tell people I get all of my "news" off the internet - much from foreign sources - because the US media is more interested in shilling for the chimp and in hyping irrelevent crap about missing blondes than it is in honest reporting, they think there's something wrong with me. At a friend's house a year or so ago the conversation turned to Laci Peterson and our hosts were incredulous that we had barely heard of the case and weren't paying attention to it.

Ever see Jay Leno do his "Jaywatch" segment? Ask a guy on the street who Rumsfeld is and get a blank stare. That's America in a nutshell.

[ChicagoRonin]

5. The real problem is one of consequences . . .

Despite all of our anger about the ignorance of a great many Americans, the fact is that the way our country is structured and operates allows the average citizen to get through the day without knowing anything outside the scope of their own life. If you are a child of comfortable middle-class parents, living, say, in a predominantly white and conservative neighborhood, with few if any minorities and a low crime rate, you might never know of a world beyond. Plus, if you have plenty of creature comforts (TV, malls, movies, videogames, etc.) what reason would you have for wanting to go anywhere where you might have to deal with strife, conflict, dirt or unpleasantness. If more people lived next door to the consequences of, for example, poverty, racism, globalization, or international conflictss, they'd be force to confront their causes, especially if the government (or consumer business) is unavailable to shield them.

[EFerrari]

6. Let's keep this thread kicked and rec'd.

:kick: