One would think with 24-hour cable news channels blaring, and the Internet abuzz with blogging and reporting, that Americans would be more informed than ever.
One would be wrong.A survey last month of 1,502 adults by the Pew Research Center of the People and the Press was eye-opening for me.
Since I am immersed in news every day, sometimes I forget that most people aren't immersed in news at all.
So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when I read the results of the Pew survey - but I was anyway.
They did the same survey in 1989 and compared the results to 2007.
In 1989, 74 percent of respondents could identify the vice president as Dan Quayle.
In 2007, 69 percent of respondents could identify Vice President Dick Cheney.
I realize that Quayle had that whole potato misspelling incident going on and was perceived as underintelligent.
But honestly, Dick Cheney?
After all that guy's had going on, he's not as well-known as Quayle was, even in this information-soaked society we live in?
I find that almost unbelievable.
Cheney has been the frontman running PR for W during the Iraq war.
There was Haliburton and the Scooter Libby/Valeria Plame outing scandal.
For crying in a bucket, the guy shot his hunting buddy in the face.
After all that, only 69 percent of Americans know Dick Cheney is vice president.
I bet 80 percent can name at least half of the finalists on "American Idol." (Showing my ignorance, I must admit that I can't name one of them.)
Respondents were told that Shia was one group of Muslims involved in the strife in Iraq, a paltry 32 percent could identify Sunni as the other Muslim group.
The percentage of respondents who could name their state's governor dropped to 66 percent.
OK, this begs the question.
When Gallup does a poll on "Trend on Honesty and Ethical Standards of Senators and Congressmen: Based on percentage saying 'very high' or 'high,'" do the results have any meaning?
If somebody does a poll asking, or if CNN/USA Today does a poll on "Was the firing of U.S. attorney David Iglesias politically motivated?" can you believe the results?
Seriously, a third of the people you are asking can't identify their own governor.
How can they possibly have informed themselves enough to have a salient opinion on whether U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fired Iglesias for political reason?
And all this amid the most free-flowing information glut in history.
It's nutty.
Another aspect of the Pew survey is even more bizarre.
They gauged the number of correct answers of those surveyed and found those who scored the highest were regular watchers of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report."
Ah yes, John Stewart, the champion of an informed citizenry.
I suppose all of this makes sense. It just furthers my long-held observation that we are a nation of hypocrites.
We want our leaders to be informed, but we don't bother to inform ourselves.
Goes hand in hand with the fact that we want our government to balance its budget, while most of us overspend and run up credit card debt.
We say that there is too much sex and violence in movies and on TV, but the highest-rated stuff on TV and in theaters is sex and violence.
We say we favor abstinence, yet 95 percent of us have sex before marriage.
We decry the sex and violence in rap music and video games, and then let our kids buy the stuff by the bushel.
We say we favor non-partisan, centrist views, but the highest-rated talk shows and authors are people like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Rosie O'Donnell.
Come to think of it, I guess it's really not all that shocking that fully a third of Americans don't know who the vice president is.
