Showing posts with label msnbc. Show all posts
Showing posts with label msnbc. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Remember that thing about framing?

Fox News headline this morning: "Obama's Debt Reduction Plan: TAX HIKES". (Caps theirs.)

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Why People Know What They Know About Politics

In my two previous posts, I looked at what people know about politics, and I looked a bit at who knows what about politics. The general theme is that people don't know very much overall, but there's variation—people know more about some things than others, and some people know more than others.

Today, I want to look at why people know what they know, and fortunately we've already seen some hints at the explanation. For example, we've seen that more people know about high-profile issues than about others. Putting that together with everything else we've seen so far suggests a fairly simple explanation for why people don't know that much about politics: it's actually kind of hard to follow, and most people have better things—or at least more pleasant things—to do than think about the awful state of the economy or whether gay people should be allowed to marry each other.