In a report out today, Reuters attempts to discredit political blogs with the results of a poll showing that “only” 22 percent of Americans read them on a regular basis:
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A majority of Americans do not read political blogs, the online commentaries that have proliferated in the race for the U.S. presidency, according to a poll released on Monday.
Only 22 percent of people responding to the poll said they read blogs regularly, meaning several times a month or more, according to the survey conducted by Harris Interactive.
Political blogs, in which writers, pundits and other participants voice opinions in online forums, burst into the spotlight in the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns. Some of the most high-profile blogs are influential on campaign strategies, media coverage and public perception of the candidates and issues.
Justin Gardner looks at the numbers and finds a significant cohort out there:
Time for some quick math. The American population is roughly 300 million people. About 73% of that group is over the age of 20, which roughly translates into 219 million people. Now, it’s obvious people younger than 20 read blogs (as the survey shows), but I’m still going to work with that 216M number. So I’ll take 22% of 219M, which gives me approximately 48 million people. If that’s the number of people reading blogs a few times a month, well, that’s a pretty big number, don’t you think?
So instead of a headline that reads, “Poll: Most Americans don’t read political blogs,” it should probably read, “Poll: 48 million Americans read political blogs regularly.”
And James Joyner looks deeper into the poll and finds some interesting results:
[W]e have a survey showing that 44 percent of Americans read political blogs occasionally and 23 percent read them several times a year. Among those who do, 78 percent find them as accurate or more accurate than the mainstream press and 82 percent find them as valuable or more valuable than the mainstream press. Yet the story is framed as blogs being inaccurate and less widely read than some might think?
Well, this is the MSM we’re talking about here.
March 11th, 2008 at 11:13 am
When politicians wake-up and realize that the blogs are nothing more than next generation AOL chat rooms, where the discourse is typically on par with graffiti one finds in a gas station wash room, then what little influence bloggers now enjoy shall evaporate.
The sad fact is that bloggers are almost the only ones who read these blogs with any frequency. The blogs could be a place where great ideas are exchanged, discussed and consensus reached, if people would actually read and participate in the discussions in constructive ways. Unfortunately, almost all blogs are used for one-sided political rants, self promotion and the occasional political satire (the latter, a subject area in which I like to post).
Most of the sheeple will tell you that they are too busy being scared by the propaganda on TV to actually read anything, let alone to learn the facts of an issue in order to reach their own conclusion.
Walter Cronkite, the former CBS anchorman, recently was quoted, expressing dismay that our American citizens are now too ill-informed to self govern this Republic. I wish he were wrong, but just look at the Democratic front-runners for the Presidential nomination, Billary and Obama. Dramatic proof, that our citizens have no idea what they are doing!