Manufactured Ignorance

Bob Somerby on the widely-reported Pew poll showing that most people don’t know much about either their own religion or anyone else’s:

Can we talk? We the people always turn out to be “deeply ignorant,” on any information survey. In response, major broadcasters feign surprise. It’s how such things are done.

My favorite, as longtime readers know, is the annual geography survey that always produces howls of indignation. 70% of high school kids don’t know where France is! 80% can’t find Kansas City on a map!

Of course, no one ever bothers testing adults, who would probably do just as poorly. Just as they do poorly on surveys of American history, constitutional knowledge, current events, and everything else. Most of us just don’t know very much about anything.

And least of all about complicated legislative proposals. A couple of days ago I linked to an AP poll that asked people what they thought about healthcare reform. I decided to devote my post to the question of whether a more liberal proposal would have been more popular (almost certainly not), which didn’t leave room to talk about a long series of questions AP asked about the legislation itself. Basically, they wanted to find out what people knew about the law, and the answer is: meh. Of the true items AP mentioned, 69% thought they were part of the law. Of the made-up items, 37% thought they were part of the law. Not bad, I guess (and note that these numbers assume that I know which items were right and which were wrong), but it’s still the case that 20% of the country thinks you’ll have to disclose major diseases to your employer, 30% think the law requires insurance companies to charge smokers an extra $1,000, 40% think death panels will be empowered to pass judgment on individual treatment, and 50% think the law requires doctors to treat illegal immigrants.

Now where do you think so many people could have gotten these ideas? It’s not just simple ignorance at work, though that’s certainly part of it. It’s the noise machine. If you listened to Rush and Sean and Sarah and Glenn and Drudge all day, you’d probably believe most of this stuff too. And you’d oppose the law. Who wouldn’t?