NPR Listeners: Not As Smart As They Might Think

One of the mildest insults that comes my way each election season is "You must get your news from FoxNews!" Truth is that I have watched about 3 hours of FoxNews in my entire life, about half of it via web snippets posted on YouTube during the last few months. Proudly TV-illiterate, I thought it was "Fox news", as in the news on the Fox channel, not FoxNews, a separate entity that competed with CNN.

That being said, my primary font of daily news has been NPR. I resent the smarter-than-thou attitude of most NPR devotees and actively complement news and opinion from other sources. Their spin is ever so subtle, but we'll save that discussion for another day.

All this being said, I know that when I chat with any regular NPR listener I can expect them to have a slightly better understanding of the world than, say, Joe the Plumber. After all, a college-educated, 50-year-old white male, earning $78,000 a year*, ought to know better, no?

The truth about what the average NPR listener does NOT know is quite sad. Consider this:

3 out of every 10 can't name the U.S. Secretary of State.
3 out of every 10 can't tell you which party currently has a majority in the US House of representatives.
4 out of every 10 can't name the British Prime Minister.

To be fair to them, that's better than folks who get their news from virtually every other source, save for readers of the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly.

Rush Limbaugh and Hannity & Colmes audiences did much better at naming the majority party in Congress (83% and 84%) than did NPR listeners (73%).

College grads comprise 54% of NPR's audience, but only 31% of Hannity & Colmes' audience, yet, H&C's viewers did better on two of the three questions.

The survey was conducted by the Pew Research Center, which NPR and PBS fiends know is not a conservative organization.


* Standard profile of the "average" NPR listener. I forget where I heard this statistic.