Text 12642, 39 rader
Skriven 2008-03-13 12:59:07 av Jeff Bowman (1:229/500)
Ärende: Americans and Politics
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I was just mentioning in a couple posts recently about how the average American
doesn't tend to concern themselves with politics and such these days, being a
big reason why I don't consider them more active against things the government
does.  And then a poll popped up in the news which was related, so I thought
I'd pass it along.
 
Of course, polls can come a dime a dozen, so apply whatever bias you think
applies to Pew Research Center, I suppose.  I don't know anything about them,
myself.
 
Basically, it says only 28% of Americans are aware that nearly 4,000 U.S.
personnel have died in Iraq.  Nearly half the population thinks it's 3,000 or
fewer, and 23% think it's higher.  Though apparently last summer, people were
much more aware; about half those asked were correct at the time.
 
There's some more stats in there for anyone interested:
 
http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=401
 
 
Not sure if this is still from Pew, but 36% of people say they closely follow
campaign news, 14% expressed interest in the stock market, 12% interested in
the death of Heath Ledger, with only 6% closely following coverage of Iraq. As
for the latter, I'm guilty myself a lot of the time.  It seems to be on the
news every single day. Eventually you just tune a lot of it out.
 
In another article, Pew found that 53% of Americans believe the U.S. will
ultimately succeed in achieving its goals in Iraq, up 11 points from September.
 Those that think the war in Iraq is going "very well" or "fairly well" is also
up to 48%, from 30% a year ago.
 
So yeah, none of these statistics really surprise me at all.  It just goes
along with what I was saying.  If people were more aware of world politics and
the government and everything, they might do more or have different opinions. 
But most people just have better things to do in their daily lives than keep up
with all this junk.  Us here debating it are quite the minority.

--- D'Bridge 2.99
 * Origin: FyBBS (1:229/500)