I sent "Circular search for poll results on what you know and what you watch" to Fairleigh Dickinson University's Public Mind and received a nice reply from Prof. Peter J. Wooley, founding Executive Director of Public Mind.
I am not sure why I only saw one page of the eleven page report last week. Maybe I had fiddled with my preferences in Firefox so that a web page now is automatically opening an associated PDF file.
I have now read the full report. I also read the article that Prof. Wooley wrote with his colleague Dan Cassini, see "Fox News Does Not Make You Dumb: Researchers Respond to Critics", Huffington Post, 2012-05-15. Interestingly, when I read the article for my first post in this series I saw no reference to this rebuttal, and that article was posted a week after Wooley and Cassini's article.
The numbers that Public Mind published were weighted numbers that considered the correct answer and some demographics about the respondents. Thus, the results were all under 2.0, leading rushed readers like me to assume that most people only got at most two answers correctly. You can see all the questions at http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/final.pdf.
I am a bit confused that they mention eight questions in the tables but list nine questions in the text. I answered seven correctly, not remembering who "won" the Presidential Primary in New Hampshire and what the deal was to pass the payroll tax deduction extension.
However, the overall results were dismal. Regardless of political leanings, 62 percent of the respondents answered four or less questions correctly, with 57 percent and 63 percent for Democrats and Republicans, respectively. I wouldn't draw any conclusions from that last difference. But, if the overall sample is representative of our voters, over half the eligible voters not being able to answer half or less of some standard questions about the news does not bear well for our democracy.
We can't attribute these results to TV news. Seventy-two percent of the respondents claim to get some of their news from a local newspaper, and the spread according to political leaning is only four percent to either side. Maybe it is that too many of us filter the news to our own biases.
Oh, well! There's nothing new about biased interpretation of events. It's been going on in this country for over 250 years! We have survived this long, maybe we'll get some leaders now and then who can stand above partisanship and see farther than some narrow interests.
