Jonah Goldberg devotes his LA Times column today to a subject near and dear to my heart: the uninformed electorate. In this case, Goldberg acknowledges that most Americans express concern about the prosecutor purge scandal, but he makes an intellectually consistent case — public opinion doesn’t matter because people don’t know what they’re talking about.
Huge numbers of Americans don’t know jack about their government or politics. According to a Pew Research Center survey released last week, 31% of Americans don’t know who the vice president is, fewer than half are aware that Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the House, a mere 29% can identify “Scooter” Libby as the convicted former chief of staff of the vice president, and only 15% can name Harry Reid when asked who is the Senate majority leader.
Also last week, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans believe that Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales’ firing of eight U.S. attorneys was “politically motivated.”
So, we are supposed to believe that two-thirds of Americans have studied the details of the U.S. attorney firings and come to an informed conclusion that they were politically motivated — even when Senate Democrats agree that there is no actual evidence that Gonzales did anything improper. Are these the same people who couldn’t pick Pelosi out of a lineup? Or the 85% who couldn’t name the Senate majority leader? Are we to imagine that the 31% of the electorate who still — after seven years of headlines and demonization — can’t identify the vice president of the United States nonetheless have a studied opinion on the firing of New Mexico U.S. Atty. David Iglesias?
This may be shamelessly elitist, but it’s not necessarily unreasonable. Too often, conservatives will manipulate polls until they say what the right wants to hear. Goldberg is taking the opposite approach — yes the polls are against me, but it doesn’t matter because people don’t know what they’re talking about and I do. There’s a certain intellectual consistency to the position.
But I think Goldberg may be missing the implications of public opinion here.
The political world is almost constantly looking for clues about whether a story (or a controversy or a meme) is catching on outside the beltway and having a discernable impact on the typical American. Polls offer the most quantitative results, so they inevitably draw intense scrutiny. And right now, the polls show the public on the critics’ side when it comes to the White House purge scandal.
Is the electorate always right? Of course not. Do Americans always know all the details? Definitely not. Do they sometimes have opinions on issues on which they’re largely uninformed? Sure.
But even if Americans don’t know who Carol Lam or Monica Goodling are, they nevertheless suspect something’s fishy about the purge. The public has probably heard at least something about this controversy over the last couple of months, and they’re not impressed with the Bush gang’s defense. The White House and Gonzales have waged a fairly aggressive public relations campaign and the public just isn’t buying it. Whether voters can name the Vice President is beside the point — the political establishment wants to know who’s winning the fight, and when two-thirds of Americans believe there was something fishy with the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, it offers politicians cover to continue pursuing the matter. If the poll results were reversed, you better believe Republicans would be emphasizing that fact.
In a situation like this one, voters don’t necessarily have to know all the details. They’ve gotten to know the White House, they’ve heard a bit about the controversy, and they have a pretty good sense of right and wrong. From what they’ve heard, this purge falls into the “wrong” category. Goldberg seems to believe this conclusion is meaningless because the masses are dolts; would he say the same thing if polls showed Americans approving of the war and disapproving of the Democrats’ policy agenda?
I should add that the rest of Goldberg’s column goes into detail lamenting the widespread ignorance of the American public, beyond just the one scandal. “Americans — God bless ’em — are often quite ignorant about the stuff politicians and pundits think matters most,” he said. “They may know piles about their own professions, hobbies and personal interests, but when it comes to basic civics, they just get their clocks cleaned on Fox’s ‘Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?'”
And while there’s certainly some truth in that, Digby reminded me of a post from, well, me, about which Americans are the most ignorant about the stuff politicians and pundits think matters most.
As the researchers explained in their report, “The extent of Americans’ misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news. Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions. Those who receive most of their news from NPR or PBS are less likely to have misperceptions. These variations cannot simply be explained as a result of differences in the demographic characteristics of each audience, because these variations can also be found when comparing the demographic subgroups of each audience.”
Almost shocking was the extent to which Fox News viewers were mistaken. Those who relied on the conservative network for news, PIPA reported, were “three times more likely than the next nearest network to hold all three misperceptions. In the audience for NPR/PBS, however, there was an overwhelming majority who did not have any of the three misperceptions, and hardly any had all three.”
Looking at the misperceptions one at a time, people were asked, for example, if the U.S. had discovered the alleged stockpiles of WMD in Iraq since the war began. Just 11% of those who relied on newspapers as their “primary news source” incorrectly believed that U.S. forces had made such a discovery. Only slightly more — 17% — of those who relied on NPR and PBS were wrong. Yet 33% of Fox News viewers were wrong, far ahead of those who relied on any other outlet.
Likewise, when people were asked if the U.S. had “clear evidence” that Saddam Hussein was “working closely with al Queda,” similar results were found. Only 16% of NPR and PBS listeners/viewers believed that the U.S. has such evidence, while 67% of Fox News viewers were under that mistaken impression.
Overall, 80 percent of those who relied on Fox News as their primary news source believed at least one of the three misperceptions. Viewers/listeners/readers of other news outlets didn’t even come close to this total.
In other words, Fox News viewers are literally less informed about these basic facts. They have, put simply, been led to believe things that are simply not true. These poor dupes would have done better in this survey, statistically speaking, if they received no news at all and simply guessed whether the claims were accurate.
Goldberg is right; a lot of data suggests Americans are uninformed. But how many of Goldberg’s fellow conservatives are skewing the results to make the rest of us look bad?
