{"id":8210,"date":"2006-08-15T12:28:00","date_gmt":"2006-08-15T16:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/8210.html"},"modified":"2006-08-15T12:28:00","modified_gmt":"2006-08-15T16:28:00","slug":"pop-culture-still-more-popular-than-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/pop-culture-still-more-popular-than-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Pop culture still more popular than politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

This will no doubt come as a surprise to absolutely no one, but Zogby offers additional proof<\/a> that Americans know a bit more about popular culture than they do about more serious matters of state — but not quite as much as I thought.<\/p>\n

Three-quarters of Americans can correctly identify two of Snow White’s seven dwarfs while only a quarter can name two Supreme Court justices, according to a poll on pop culture.<\/p>\n

According to the poll by Zogby International, commissioned by the makers of a new game show, 57% of Americans could identify J.K. Rowling’s fictional boy wizard as Harry Potter, but only 50% could name the British prime minister, Tony Blair.<\/p>\n

Just over 60% of respondents were able to name Bart as Homer’s son on the television show “The Simpsons,” compared to 20.5% who were able to name one of the ancient Greek poet Homer’s epic poems, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.”<\/p>\n

Asked what planet Superman was from, 60% named the fictional planet Krypton, while only 37% knew that Mercury is the planet closest to the sun.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, maybe this is some kind of soft bigotry of low expectations, but I didn’t find these results that<\/i> bad. Half of the county knows who the British prime minister is? That’s kind of encouraging. One in five know Homer wrote “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”? That’s almost impressive.<\/p>\n

And more than one-in-three Americans know that Mercury is the planet closest to the sun? Isn’t that a sign of some kind of scientific renaissance in our society? I would have guessed a far smaller number.<\/p>\n

Is it me or are these results pretty good?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This will no doubt come as a surprise to absolutely no one, but Zogby offers additional proof that Americans know a bit more about popular culture than they do about more serious matters of state — but not quite as much as I thought. Three-quarters of Americans can correctly identify two of Snow White’s seven […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8210\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}