Did you hear about this study? The one by the Pew Research Center, released in April, that compared folks’ “knowledge levels by news source”? If you don’t know about it, here’s the tag line: Regular viewers of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report know more about the world than viewers of Fox News. A lot more.
By Pew’s reckoning, John Stewart and Steven Colbert boast the biggest percentage of fans with a “High” knowledge level of important leaders and current events: 54 percent. Devotees of Fox News, like one Richard Bruce Cheney, Vice President of the United States of America, turned in a woeful, and dead last, 35 percent “High” mark. When it comes to naming members of congress, Supreme Court justices, or even their own states’ governors, Foxers hit about as many bull’s-eyes as the Veep’s Perazzi quail gun. “We Report, You Decide,” indeed.
But the news outlets with the biggest percentage of “Low” knowledge users were “online news discussion blogs.” Thirty-seven percent of those who listed blogs as their news sources rated “Low,” edging the 35 percent of Foxers who couldn’t tell the difference between John Roberts and Joe Millionaire.
In other words, there’s a whole lot of stupid out there on the netwebs.
Take heart, though, blogophiles. Yes, a lot of blowhards have turned from talk radio to T-1 lines. And sometimes the comment threads on USA Today articles read like a convocation of Roger Ailes-addled yokels. But if you can’t beat ‘em, you can at least laugh at them. And no one laughs at the swollen, suppurating ranks of the “101st Chairborne” quite like the gentle people at Sadly, No!
When Lord Byron said, “Fools are my theme, let satire be my song,” he may not have had the epically foolish 26%-ers over at Blogs for Bush in mind, but he would surely approve of the gleeful deconstruction wrought upon them daily by Sadly, No!’s resident bards. Gavin M, Retardo Montalban, Bradley S. Rocket, and the other SN! satirists are to the web what John Stewart is to cable news.
I’m not even going to try to describe the Polonium-strength barbs they toss at bloggy nincompoops like Debbie Shlussel, Micheal Medved, and Jonah “Doughbob Loadpants” Goldberg. Just go to the site yourself and check it out. I think you’ll agree that Gavin, Retardo, et all perform an incredibly important social function: like an online superfund-site team, they scour the nether reaches of the American cyber-Id so that we don’t have to, digging into the worst political Love Canals out there. And with satire in place of hazmat suits, they show us the toxic dumping ground that our national discourse has become.
Oh. And they’re funny as hell, too.