What Do You Know?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr2MES43TxA

Pew Study on the Media: “In spite of an expanding variety of ways to get news, a sizable minority of young people continues to go newsless on a typical day. Fully 29% of those younger than 25 say they got no news yesterday either from digital news platforms, including cell phones and social networks, or traditional news platforms. That is little changed from 33% in 2010.”

I read it on Facebook: “In the shifting online landscape, the use of mobile devices and social networking sites have replaced a traditional tool — search engines — as the driver of growth in finding news online.”

What a drag: “Since 2008, there have been steep declines in the percentages of young people and liberal Democrats who say they enjoy following the news a lot.”

The John Edwards strategy was to make ’em laugh.

“They were pounding on me for positive information. You know, where is some good news we can share with people? We were monitoring all these polls and I was sending the ones that were most favorable because [campaign aides] wanted to share them with reporters,” Hickman testified on May 14 at the trial in Greensboro, N.C. “We were not finding very much good news and I was trying to give them what I could find.”

Hickman testified that when circulating the polls, he didn’t much care if they were accurate. “I didn’t necessarily take any of these as for—as you would say, for the truth of the matter. I took them more as something that could be used as propaganda for the campaign,” the veteran pollster said.

Information, information everywhere. And what have we got to show for it?

About half the public (52%) also knew that the national unemployment rate is about 8%. Almost all regular audiences were at least as likely as the general public to get this question right.

Just 22% of the public identified Germany as the country that Angela Merkel leads. Many audiences fared somewhat better on this question than the public as a whole, but most regular readers, viewers and listeners did not know this or offered no response.

Two-thirds of the public knew that Barack Obama—not Mitt Romney—is more supportive of increasing taxes on higher-income people. Majorities of all news audiences answered this question correctly.

News You Can Use: “Romney truly is the whitest man to run for president because he doesn’t realize how his whiteness has influenced his life and how his class standing provided him with remarkable educational and financial opportunities.”