By Young Soo Yang
Nowadays, people have access to more news and information than ever before. Blogs,Twitter feeds, and social media tools connect us to up-to-the-minute accounts of major news events as they are happening. But all that information doesn’t seem to be making us smarter when it comes to understanding current affairs. Responses by New Jerseyans to a poll conducted more than a month ago by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind Poll reveal a lack of basic understanding of global events and national politics.
But more telling is what it reveals about the effectiveness of news sources used by the respondents. The findings offer a mixed bag of media winners and losers.
NPR listeners and viewers of Sunday talk shows, overall, had the highest performance in correctly answering the questions. According to Peter Woolley, Executive Director of the FDU PublicMind Poll, the amount of time spent and the depth of coverage provided by those news sources on a few issues makes a difference.
But the findings show that straight news isn’t the only effective means for enlightening audiences. For instance, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” outperformed legitimate news outlets like CNN in informing people about key issues. When comedy shows do a better job of providing the news, it may be a troubling sign that mainstream media has blurred the line between news and entertainment. For Woolley, there is a clear line, saying “there is a difference between entertainment and information and many media willfully cross that line . . . which does not serve the American public.”
Exposure to news channels with an ideological bent like Fox News and MSNBC didn’t seem to provide any significant advantage when it came to answering questions on domestic politics. When asked to identify the party affiliation of the Occupy Wall Street protestors, the findings revealed that viewers of the left-leaning MSNBC were more likely to misidentify the protesters as Republicans.
Surprisingly, watching Fox News didn’t help or hurt when asked to identify the Republican front runners for the Republican Presidential nomination. Watching MSNBC, however, was associated with a 10-point increase in correctly identifying Romney as the leader compared to those who had no exposure to news at all. Woolley is not surprised, saying that “MSNBC spends a lot of time on Republicans to criticize or mock them.”
Fox News viewers fared poorly when asked about overseas conflicts. For instance, people who watch Fox News are 18 points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all. They are also six points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government than those who watch no news.
The poll also revealed a lack of understanding what Woolley describes as the “biggest story of 2011” — the Euro Crisis. Asked which country has had to spend the most money bailing out the most financially distressed members of the European Union, only 30 percent correctly identified Germany, with 22 percent saying it’s the U.S. The failure to grasp the impact of the crisis on the U.S. economy is troubling says Woolley, because “German Chancellor Angela Merkel has more to do with whether Barack Obama is re-elected than Barack Obama.”
But the most disturbing aspect of the state-wide poll may be what it doesn’t reveal: what the rest of the nation knows or does not know. Woolley points out that “New Jersey as a state has a far higher percentage of college-educated or post-college-educated graduates than most states.” Also, “New Jersey is crisscrossed by two major media markets,” thereby exposed to more information.