Rising To The Cheap Bait
Fri, 09/14/2007 - 12:00pm
I normally like the Center for American Progress' blog Think Progress. Every now and then, though, I wonder who gets the editorial say when it comes to posting certain stories.
Yesterday, a post went up briefly discussing a survey that purports to show that while only 15% of Americans can name the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, 66% of Americans can name one the the judges on American Idol. This predictably devolved into a "liberals think Americans are stupid" meme-flinging contest in the comments on said post.
I detest troll polling. I'm kind of surprised that this showed up on Think Progress with no qualification or discussion by the poster. I call this kind of polling "troll polling" because all it is good for is stirring up trolls and deepening our already well-defined divisions.
Of course more Americans know the name of an American Idol judge than the name of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Duh! One is an immensely popular cultural icon that is backed by millions of dollars of multimedia marketing (author's note: I died a little on the inside typing those words because reality TV makes me want to chew thumbtacks) while the other, although it is the most powerful court in the U.S. and a staple of political machinations, operates out of view of the public for roughly 30 weeks of the year.
OK, so maybe I'm being a little hard on the good folks at the Annenberg Center by accusing them of troll polling. They are generally one of the more consistent and respectable opinion polling operations around these days. This poll was commissioned in the lead up to Constitution Day (September 17th, next Monday), so I can see how the questions are supposed to highlight the gaps in Constitutional knowledge in the U.S.
Still, I'm not convinced that had this survey been administered (with appropriate cultural adjustments) in 1934 or 1974 or 1994 that you would have found any greater number of Americans being able to identify the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in relation to Lil' Abner, the cast of The Brady Bunch or Kurt Cobain.
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cultural diversions in an earlier era
By aburgin4peace
Fri, 09/14/2007 - 7:49pm
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The saturation of popular culture throughout various levels of society did not happen until popular media, namely tv, brought it into everyone's living room. Even then, it took a few decades to permeate every corner of the good old USA.
Family discussions at my Thanksgiving table, back in the 60's, consisted of conversations about the Cold War, Vietnam, and the progress of Civil Rights. I was the first in my extended family to graduate from college, so this has nothing to do with socio-economic background. We had tv, sure. My favorite show was Slattery's People, about a legislator in a small state. If people wanted to buy magazines about popular culture, they had to sneak into the drugstore while no one was looking and buy a copy of one of those tabloid-looking movie magazines. Now, People magazine is considered great literature compared to the others in that same market. And they're all displayed on point-of-purchase end caps.
My grandmother owned a beauty shop. She worked hard to save money every two years so she could go to the state Democratic Convention. I still have some of her badges and credentials. I also have her letters, beautiful flowing prose with coherent sentence structure. She dropped out of ninth grade.
We're doing something wrong in this culture.
We Are Doing Something Wrong
By Patrick M McLeod
Mon, 09/17/2007 - 1:09am
...but it's got nothing to do with American Idol.
I agree that we're doing something wrong with our civic education, aburgin4peace.
I do not think that it is popular culture's fault; I write that as someone who finds little of value and little to respect in popular culture. I think that laying our casual civic education in this country at the feet of popular culture is a straw man. Popular culture, stretching way back before things like TV were anything other than a passing hallucination, has always been blamed for things that one group or another disliked that had a tenuous link to popular culture.