At least three misjudgments are common around American Independence Day: thinking one’s feet are faster than the fuse on a bottle rocket, believing there’s always room for one more “freedom dog,” and hailing the colonial past as a civic golden age. We conjure images of illustrious ancestors holding forth in packed town halls, declaring independence, and debating the Constitution. Citizens today, in contrast, are dolts—distracted, politically ignorant, and apathetic.
April’s Pew Research Center survey, “What Americans Know: 1989-2007” doesn’t support that view, though superficially the findings do seem bad. Despite “news and information revolutions,” the number of people who could name the vice president dropped from 74 percent of respondents in 1989 to 69 percent today. Similar falloffs were found in the number of people who could name their state governor (down from 74 to 66 percent) or the president of Russia (down from 47 to 36 percent). Some readers quickly judged this a tumble in public knowledge. (Wonkette: “Americans are just getting dumber overall.”)
But the Pew authors rightly conclude that, across all the questions examined, there is “little change in overall levels of public knowledge.” They might have added that the survey is consistent with a more comprehensive study, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters (1996). In the earlier work, the co-authors Michael Delli Carpini, now dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, and Scott Keeter, today Pew’s research director, discovered that citizens of the 1980s and early 1990s demonstrated “about the same” levels of political knowledge as citizens of the 1940s. Putting the two studies together, one can conclude that the American mind holds as much (or as little) political knowledge in 2007 as it did in 1947, and the question of whether that’s good or bad is a matter of perspective. Either...
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I think that today's mass media allows for candidates and representatives to more easily confuse the constituency about their true goals and records. Our rules on this hardly seem to require that 'truth' really be the overall standard. Because of this and because of the sheer expansion of government as a career and a money making venture in and of itself, it is more important than ever, that we as citizens either know what our government office holder is really doing with our money and our votes, or we willingly give that trust to some other watchdog (which longterm is just as easily corrupted as the politicians themselves).
I don't think we are more dumb as a society, but I do think that as we get more education, the politicians try to get the water ever more muddy to keep real informed debate from happening. In this way, even though we've become smarter and more educated, we still remain confused, apathetic, and out of touch with Washington DC.
Posted by felix polanski
on Mon 13 Aug 2007 at 08:54 PM