Media Shapes Views of Low-Information Voters

A funny television feature by Dan Joseph on MRCTV prompted Janice Shaw Crouse of The American Thinker to question how public opinion could possibly be so distorted these days.

In man-on-the-street interviews, the reporter asked numerous people whether President Obama or President Bush was responsible for the government shutdown. A hilarious succession of people solemnly declared that President Bush is the one responsible. According to Crouse, while the interviews are laughable, the problem of "low-information voters" is not funny at all. A republic whose educational and cultural institutions produce voters that are ill informed cannot hope to arrive at good civic decisions.

Evidence that the public is not well-informed abounds. According to the Pew Research Center's biennial survey, television is still the public's top news source (69 percent) and the public still believes that journalists are the ones who make sense of issues and conflicts (54 percent) and that the press is a "watchdog" preventing political leaders from misleading the public (43 percent).

Yet,writes Crouse,  a fawning New York City reporter, WABC's Diana Williams, interviewed President Obama, asking him if he felt any responsibility for the government shutdown.

Astoundingly, the president accepted absolutely no responsibility whatsoever, calling the standoff purely a result of the "bad strategy" of the GOP, aimed at "blindsiding" the Democrats and "extracting ransom."

Crouse opines that the reporter left unchallenged Obama's self-serving statements that painted him as "above the fray" and totally innocent of any involvement in the political crisis. Despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, the president claimed that he had a "track record of consistently seeking compromise," to the point that members of his party "were critical of him," but that he "always does what is best for the country." The reporter summed up the interview by calling him "calm, thoughtful and kind." Calm, perhaps. Kind? Crouse wonders, “What planet has this reporter been living on for the last five years?”

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