Pivoting off Ilya Somin’s new book on political ignorance, Jack Shafer argues that the advent of mass media has done little to cure it:
Our political ignorance is as enduring as it is pervasive. When the Pew Research Center study compared the political knowledge of 1989 respondents with those from 2007 it found the advent of multiple 24-hour news channels, the C-SPAN channels, and hundreds of news sites on the Web had not moved the political ignorance dial in any appreciable way. Nor have massive rises in education over the past half-century put a dent in political ignorance, Somin finds. “On an education-adjusted basis, political knowledge may actually have declined, with 1990s college graduates having knowledge levels comparable to those of high school graduates in the 1940s,” he writes, even though IQ scores have been rising.
Somin responds:
None of this suggests that media coverage of politics is useless. It does provide helpful information to the minority of voters who do follow political issues closely. And sometimes the media uncover a major scandal that penetrates the consciousness even of those members of the public who are usually oblivious to political news. Without the media, politicians bureaucrats, and interest groups would cause more harm than at present. But the media is unlikely to solve the problem of widespread political ignorance.
The Dish 