Informed America?

Thomas Patterson, a professor of government and the press at Harvard who conducted the survey, said that young people today do not make an appointment with news every day the way older adults do.

“We found that most young adults don’t have an ingrained news habit,” he said. “Most children today, when watching television, are not watching the same TV set that their parents are watching. So even if their parents are watching the news every day, the children are likely to be in another room watching something else and aren’t acquiring the news habit.”

“What we found is that what people mean when they say they are engaged in the news has much more of a glancing, superficial basis than anything we would have hoped,” he said. “Young people seemed to think that just listening to the radio in the background was listening to the news.”

I don't believe this surprises anyone in the liberal media. This "glancing, superficial" attention to the news is why the liberal bias of negative headlines, and liberal-leaning sound bites are so effective and necessary if the mainstream media is to control the national mood.

This is how the media can pick out the "one" negative aspect of this roaring economy with its record Dow and low unemployment... Stick the negative story in the headlines... Bury the good news in paragraph 10... And make everyone think we're living in "hard times" - until a Democrat president is elected.