Better Informed?

The Internet has made Americans feel better informed, according to a new Pew study. The key point -- 76 percent of respondents say the Internet has made "average Americans" better informed, and 77 percent say the net has made "America's students" better informed. You can see the raw questionnaire here.

A couple of points.

• First, this is perception of being informed, not actual knowledge. Perceived knowledge and actual knowledge are positively correlated, but not perfectly so, and there are segments of the population who believe they are better informed than they actually are, and the consumption of certain media can exacerbate this effect (i.e., talk radio). Here respondents were asked not whether they are better informed thanks to the Internet, but rather whether others are better informed. That's a subtle difference.

• There's an interesting table on the types of information available on the net that makes you feel better informed. Look at it (Q34 on the raw questionnaire, but page 2 of the pdf). In most cases people feel better informed, but the fascinating failure, if you will, is for "civic life and government activities in your community," a 49-49 split. Also the net seems to better serve national and international news as opposed to local news (see top of table). That makes sense, as the Internet destroys geography and cobbles us back together based on interests, partisanship, and the rest.

Those are my two takeaways. There's no a lot here otherwise, in part because it appears this is part of a bigger survey in which the results are not yet out.

Religious Freedom

It's the first day of classes, so little time to sit, think, and write.  But there's a new report out by the fine folks at Pew on religious freedom:

Rising Restrictions on Religion, a recent report by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, finds that restrictions on religious beliefs and practices rose between mid-2006 and mid-2009 in 23 of the world’s 198 countries (12%), decreased in 12 countries (6%) and remained essentially unchanged in 163 countries (82%).

Casey Anthony and the News

Just when you thought the nightmare might be over, the fine folks at Pew put out a really useful analysis of news coverage and interest in the trial of She Who Must Not Be Named (except in the title above, thus attracting web traffic and building my brand and all that other social networking crud).  Check the Pew study yourself rather than have me shamelessly lift their content here, Huffpost-like.  But there are a couple of key points I'd like to make note of and then comment on.

• Nearly half of those surveyed said news organizations had been fair in the coverage of She Who Must Not Be Named.  Only 20 percent thought coverage had been unfair.  Thirty-one percent of respondents (apparently dead) had no opinion.  I'd love to see a breakdown of this question by the news network or social media consumed.

• Lots of folks heard/read about you-know-who via social media -- 40 percent said "a lot" and, frankly, that's an awful lot.  I admit it, I heard about the verdict via Twitter and immediately called my wife.

• Actual coverage of the who-know-who trial was high, so high it tied coverage of the national debt.  It may have felt like it was all her trial, all the time, but both stories tied at 17 percent of coverage.  I'm betting the numbers on HLN were, ahem, somewhat different.

• But actual coverage is different than actual interest by real folks.  In this, She Who Must Not Be Named dominated coverage.  Far dominated, at 37 percent compared to 17 percent on the economy.  Nothing like a big trial to take our collective minds off a lousy economic situation.

What the Public Knows ...

Only 38 percent of U.S. adults know which house of the legislature the GOP controls, according to a Pew report (full report here).  Graph below.

Navigating Online News

How do people find the news?  What makes them stick around?  And where do they go afterward?  The Pew Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism has a new report out, an extensive one that digs deep into the data, to answers these and other questions.  Obviously you can read it for yourself rather than me repeat what it says, but lemme hit a few high notes:

• About 2/3 of all traffic to news sites is direct, about 1/3 comes from links.
• Of the roughly 40 percent referrals, Google is the Gorilla.  No surprise there.  See this cool graphic.
• While Google dominates, Facebook is the up-and-comer, often second or third place in referrals to the web sites studied.
• What about Twitter?  Not so important.  For some reason, the LATimes gets a lot of traffic via Twitter compared to other major news sites.
• Most users of news sites are "casual."  Among "power users" we see CNN first, followed by Fox News, Yahoo, AOL News, Google News, and MSNBC.
• Here's a mind boggling statistic: 69 percent of visitors to Google News end up in one of three places -- nytimes.com, cnn.com, and abcnews.com.

It'll take some time to digest the entire report, but it tells us a helluva lot about how people navigate the newsverse.

An Obama Bump

President Obama got a public opinion bump -- hardly surprising -- after the killing of Osama bin Laden, according to a new Pew poll.  His "approval" numbers went from 47 percent in April to 56 percent on May 2.  Republicans were unchanged.  The "approval" jump came from Dems and, to a greater extent, self-described Independents.  In other words, no matter what Obama does, the GOPers aren't really going to change their mind.

"Disapprovals" did inch down from Republicans (81 to 79 percent), but that's well within the margin of error.

All age groups moved up in "approval" of Obama.  He got his biggest bump from non-whites, at least compared to the bump from whites.

In terms of what people know, or where they heard what they know, it's interesting to note that young people heard about the bin Laden news from social media significantly more than other age groups.  Not surprising, mind you, but interesting.

New Pew Political IQ

The fine folks at Pew have another report out that looks at what people know, and the results are about what you'd expect.  Put simply, not great.  At the risk of ruining it for you if you hoped to take the test yourself, below you'll see the results of their late-March 2011 survey.  Read down the report to find breakdowns by age, partisan preference, and all the rest.

Top Stories of The Decade(2000-2010)

The Pew Center, using audience interest figures, has come up with its own list of the top stories from 2000 to 2010. 

You can follow the link or check out the graphic below.  It's hardly surprising that 9/11 ranks at #1 or Katrina as #2.  After that, I'm a bit surprised about gasoline prices being #3, but then again this is a survey of reader interest, the percent who said they followed a story closely, so of course people vote with their billfolds.  Interesting factoid -- the falling gas prices makes it to #16.

I would have put the economic meltdown as #3, perhaps pushing #2 since it affects more people.  And it's a bit sad that the nation can be at war and yet the war is only #6.  There are some interesting results deeper in the list.  At #18, the Pledge of Allegiance court decision?  I'd forgotten all about that one.

Move Over TV News

A new Pew study shows that, among college grads, the Internet has begun to rival television news as a source of information.

First off, let's establish that a historical point -- the greater the education, the less the reliance on TV for news and information.  It's that whole delusions of adequacy thing.  The audience for TV news, local especially, tends to skew to the less educated.  So the Pew report is not all that surprising, but it does document quite nicely the growing power of the Net when it comes to how the educated keep informed.

Blogger is in one of its moods, so I'm having trouble dropping in a key graphic from the report.  Here's a few key numbers.  For those with a high school education or less, 75 percent said they rely on TV news and 29 percent said they rely on the Internet.  For those with a college degree, the same numbers are 54 and 51 percent.  That's huge, and telling.  And problematic for the TV folks. 

What I find interesting is the lack of a partisan effect.  Dems, GOPers, Independents, they all break down more or less the same in the aggregate media use columns.  Now if we get into the nitty gritty, not provided here, we'd find the usual partisan migration to Fox or MSNBC, but it's interesting as hell to see that at the aggregate media use level, your partisan leanings don't seem to correlate with a general preference for TV news versus that of the Net or other sources.

In terms of what people know, we can make a few assumptions based on these results.  First, TV news appeals to the less educated not because TV news is dumb, but because it's more easily consumed, provides less detail, but makes the world's events more understandable given the way TV tells a story.  We know from other studies that TV news seems to inform only those with little or no information in the first place -- which is a fine and useful mission, though it might raise certain issues when it comes to selling advertising that appeals to a prime audience.  Print, especially, seems to require a lot more background knowledge and certainly motivation in order to grasp the content. 

What we may see, as this migration among media continues, is a growing knowledge gap between those of less and more education. 

Latest Pew Quiz of What People Know

As always, the fine folks at Pew come through with a news quiz report that saves the day, blog-wise, when it's time for me to post something.  See the graphic below, and discussion that follows.

I often find it more interesting and illuminating to look at what people don't know.  Take the final question.  Only 14 percent could correctly identify the inflation rate.  The choices were 1, 5, 10, or 20 percent, which makes it rather obvious.  Either people don't understand inflation, or they overestimate it in difficult economic times.
 
Also interesting is less than half of respondents knew what party would be in control of the House of Representatives -- despite a million stories both predicting this and detailing what it all means after the election.  This tells us a large chunk of American is tuned out of the partisan politics of our time.  Which also explains why Republicans tend to do better in low-turnout elections and Democrats tend to do better in high-turnout elections.

The age breakdown is fun.  Young people do lousy when it comes to questions about politics, but by god they know Android is Google's operating system.  The other demographic breakdowns look a lot like many others we've seen.  Men score higher than women, whites scores higher than blacks, older respondents score higher than younger respondents, better educated outperform the less educated, and Republicans slightly outscore Democrats -- though on the last one, if you control for education, that difference would probably disappear.  In other words, no real surprises here.

Like the rest of the planet, I blogged earlier this week about the major Pew study on religious knowledge.  I'm filling in the gaps over the next couple of days, working my way through a rather long pdf to get to the news lede -- it isn't so much your religious affiliation, it's your education that matters.

On page 37, we discover:

The survey results are clear: People with higher levels of education tend to be more knowledgeable about religion.

Which makes perfectly good sense.  Education tends to drive most tests of knowledge, from politics to science to health.  Having taken a specific college-level religion course also leads to greater knowledge, at least on the items asked here -- which, by the way, strike me as both comprehensive and fair when it comes to measuring something as difficult as "knowledge" of religion.

There are some fascinating demographic breakdowns deep in the study, though few of them truly surprising.  Indeed, they look a lot like the results you'd get studying political knowledge.  For those who care about such things, Republicans outscored Democrats on religious knowledge, but self-described conservatives and liberals were a statistical tie.  Go figure.

At the end, the fine folks at Pew crank the data through a regression analysis to see what really matters when it comes to what people know about religion.  The results? 

• Education matters.  It dominates the model.
• But religious affiliation still explains some of the variance, which is a fancy way of saying even if you control for education, atheists/agnostics, Mormons, and Jews still outperform everyone else.
• Controlling for all this, having a high religious commitment also adds a bit in performance.

So what can we say?  Well, for one, I can say that in six months I'll be downloading these data and playing with them like a kid at Christmas.  Unfortunately there aren't a lot of other variables to work with here, and no serious media variables.  Too bad.

Who Knows More About Religion?Atheists and Agnostics

A new survey by the fine folks at Pew finds all kinds of interesting things about what people know and what people think they know about religion.  I can mine this thing for days and I'd love to dig more into it now but I have class soon, so let me just pop out one of the more interesting finds (see below).  On a religious knowledge survey, the least religious do the best, followed by Jews and Mormons. 

Of course it's not this simple.  The table below doesn't include controls for education, and we've not even gotten into how you actually measure religious knowledge (it's broad-based, evangelicals and Mormons, for example, do best on Christian-based knowledge).  I'll write more later, when time allows.  Fascinating stuff.

Take the 15-item quiz yourself, if you dare.

Flash -- Americans Love the News

A new Pew Center study finds Americans spend about as much time with news today than they did in the heyday of traditional mainstream media.

Obviously, looking at the graph to the left, there are winners and losers over time.  The results are hardly surprising.  What's good to know, though, is the total amount of time spent with the news, on average.

This bodes well now only for political knowledge but the health of organizations that provide the news -- assuming they can figure out a way to successfully monetize the online access.

Obama Apparently Still a MuslimExcept, of course, he's not

A new Pew survey shows that a core group of uninformed Americans believe President Obama is Muslim.

I've written at length on this topic.  An example blog post is here, I've also published research from a panel of folks during the 2008 campaign, work that appeared recently in the Journal of Media and Religion.  Hell, I've even been quoted in The New York Times about my research.  So yeah, I'm interested and somewhat knowledgeable on the topic.  See the graphic from Pew on the left.

Why is the misperception that Obama is Muslim apparently growing?  Andy Kohut of the Pew Center gave a clear explanation this morning on NPR.  In part, the "don't knows" continue to grow, perhaps because Obama does not make a big deal about his Christian beliefs, particularly compared to George W. Bush who did.  I'd also add that politics, wanting to believe "the worst" about a politician you already don't like, also play a part.  Yeah, GOPers are a lot more likely to think he's Muslim, so that suggests a political explanation.  My own research also found conservative Christians (who also happen to be Republicans) are a major factor here.

All in all, a depressing and interesting survey result.  I'd write more but I have class soon, but perhaps I'll do a follow-up posting later today.

News Quiz

The fine folks at the Pew Center have a new News IQ test available, if you feel lucky.  I got all 11 questions correct, scoring me higher than 95 percent of those who took the test.  Fear me.

The 99 Percent New Media Solution

Ninety-nine percent of all news stories linked to in blogs come from the Evil MSM (mainstream media), according to a Pew Center study.  "The BBC (23% of all blog links), CNN (21%), the New York Times (20%) and the Washington Post (16%) combined accounted for fully 80% of all news stories linked to on blogs. Web-only sites, on the other hand, made up less than 1% of the links in the blogosphere."  A more in-depth version of the study is here, with lots of info about blogs, social media topics, and the like.  Worth the read.

The point?  Net-only blogs and news sources have yet to generate the kind of reporting necessary to achieve some significance, some critical mass.  They do well on commentary -- reactive rather than proactive -- just not so much on original coverage (though a few specialized sites such as Politico are getting there).

Of Blogs, Twitter, YouTube...

Here's an interesting content analysis that finds not only do blogs, Twitter, and YouTube differ from the mainstream media, they differ from one another.  Only once in 29 weeks studied did the three "social media" outlets agree on the top story.

Bloggers gravitate toward stories (often political) that elicit emotion. Twitter is squarely focused on technology. YouTube, while its top story was often seemingly random, has social media's most international mix of stories.

 The full report is here. And even more detailed one about blogs is here.

Blogs were most like the mainstream media, followed by Twitter and then YouTube.  Keep in mind these are broad categories, such as "health and medicine" or "politics/government," not specific stuff like Dancing with American Idol or similar crud, so there's plenty of room for agreement -- and, apparently, disagreement.  Blogs focus more than the mainstream media on such topics as science and technology, while the evil MSM spends more time on health, medicine, and the economy.

Twitter, or rather those who use the site, is crazy about tech.  Forty-three percent of tweets were about technology, suggested a lot of geeks talking to a lot of geeks.  Apparently no one on Twitter worries about the economy (1 percent).

Satisfied with Government? Not? Take the Quiz

The fine folks at Pew have a quick quiz to find out just how much you like or dislike government.  See how you stack up to my score, shown in the graphic below.  I'm kinda in the middle, inching toward more rather than less satisfaction with government.

Pissed at Government

People are pissed off at the federal government (until, of course, they need help, but that's a different issue).

According to a new Pew Center poll getting attention everywhere, trust in the federal government has reached a low point.  Or, they they put it:

By almost every conceivable measure Americans are less positive and more critical of government these days. A new Pew Research Center survey finds a perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government – a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials. 

Read the report.  And check out the graphic below:

The News ... Tomorrow

The lede:

America's news executives are hesitant about many of the alternative funding ideas being discussed for journalism today and are overwhelmingly skeptical about the prospect of government financing, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism in association with the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) and the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA).

Read more here in a report by the Pew Center or the full, longer report here.