the disturbing news of the uninformed majority

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/05/AR2008090502666_pf.html

A funny thing happens when you walk out your own little world. The people you encounter are instantly ignorant, unenlightened, or just plain stupid.

A few points.
1) "voters are actually basically stupid".. cato and various other think tanks have demonstrated the repeated ignorance on social and economic policies of the general public. I think MIB had it right here. A person is smart, people are dumb, frightened...and you know it. I'd vote for a candidate who admitted this fundamental flaw in our republic (or who called it a republic for starters). The actual stats: "war is god's way of teaching American's geography", only rather poorly since people can't find Iraq on a map. Or know that we're the only nuclear power to have actually used one in combat. And if people are actually watching these silly commercials and basing their decisions on them, I feel extremely distressed.

2) O'Reilly and Stewart really don't have much difference anyway. Stewart does have more of a tendency to be even handed and make fun of both 'liberal' media and whatever it is that O'Reilly is. But to imagine that the people who watch are in some way distinctly aware of the situation is preposterous. Both are humorists poking at the silly world we live in, just in very, very different ways. I find one to be hilarious and the other to be a raving lunatic (best parodied by Stewart's alternative in Colbert). Quite simply, people who watch these types of shows (instead of say, Idol..shudder) are going to be reasonably more informed than the average person otherwise they won't understand what is going on.

3) It would be nice if we did actually give people facts when reporting. Instead people pay far too much attention to spin doctored speeches and politicking rather than the actual messages and specific facts that are outlined. The fact that Americans were deceived by Bush et al into going to war with/in Iraq doesn't mean Bush was a moron by itself, because he couldn't have done so without the media not bothering to ask for information it now conveniently ignores whilst commenting on the war's uncertain progress. If people are so uninformed as to make these weird conclusions, there's only really one agency to blame: the media. The average person doesn't have the time to ask questions and follow up on them. And they probably don't have the intellectual capacity to wonder as broadly as they'd need to in order to ask them in the first place. If something sounds plausible, they accept it in good faith.

4) Nostalgia is a nice concept. I suspect two things. One the average voter was probably better informed than they are now, but wasn't yet as jaded and therefore less likely to be an average voter. I'd like to see the propensity of intelligent people who vote rather than the propensity of business people who do (not all of whom are inherently smart). And two our education system isn't nearly as good, even though it tries to be more universal than it's predecessors.

5) ? 40% of young people weren't following the 9/11 attacks? That's one of the few times I can recall being parked in front of a TV all morning watching news. Another being when there was an attempting coup in Russia after the Soviet Union was collapsing and tanks were parked in front of the Kremlin..pointing in. I do recall watching 'news' a lot when the last shuttle exploded, but it really became repetitive nonsense. Same with Katrina. So what then were people following instead of 9/11? I have no idea, but I realize that after a couple hours (once the towers collapsed) there really wasn't new news on it. It was then time to try to piece together what had happened and start acting, something our government did rather poorly (unsurprisingly, we elected through our incompetence, a representative of incredible incompetence).