Pew Survey looks at Americans' knowledge of the news …

Coverage of the latest Pew poll on Americans' media consumption and knowledge of current events will no doubt feature much hand-wringing over the fact that viewers of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report are much more knowledgeable about current events than viewers of Fox News, although I'm not sure why that would be a surprise to anyone.

And the "reality based community" shouldn't take too much comfort in that fact, given that Comedy Central viewers only scored slightly higher than Bill O'Reilly's septuagenarian audience, and NPR listeners knew as much as Rush Limbaugh fans.

And of course there are the usual punch-lines about how stunningly ignorant Americans are of the world around them: only slightly more than a third could name Russian president Vladimir Putin; fewer than one in five know who the Senate Majority leader is and three out of ten can't name the Vice President, even after six news-packed, controversial years in office (fewer can name Darth Cheney today than were able to identify the bumbling Dan Quayle in 1989).

The question that should be asked, but probably won't be, is why Americans are so out of touch with politics. It's a much-debated question, but the easy answer is that they're divorced from the workings of their large and remote DC-based government; they feel they have no power to change the status quo in any way and that feeling, more than anything, leaves way too many of them disinterested in the specifics of exactly who's screwing them and how. (I've written about it before, in the context of corruption.)

I personally believe that this is the result of a more-or-less intentional campaign to convince people of their supposed powerlessness, and every time I hear someone say of politicians, "they're all the same" or ask "what's the difference?" I think to myself: 'that right there is a huge a win for the plutocracy.'