News Quiz!

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How Well Informed Are We?

The Pew Research Center is a valuable resource for anyone interested in what’s going on in America, and what we Americans think. The researchers do constant surveys on all kinds of stuff in the news—like the health care debate or where President Obama stands in the polls, etc.—and sometimes it’s a little frustrating and frightening to find out what “we” think/know.

Sometimes it’s a little confusing to find out what “we” really think about issues, because if you watch the news, you think (for example) that most of us don’t want health care reforms (to use a current example). But a new poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, another important nonpartisan research outfit, finds that a lot of us do support health care reforms when we find out what actually is proposed, instead of what opponents and the media say about it. After all, who would not want poor people to be able to get doctor care and meds when they’re sick or hurt? Are we an enlightened society or aren’t we?

The Kaiser poll, done in January, “finds that Americans are divided over congressional health reform proposals, but also that large shares of people, including skeptics, become more supportive after being told about many of the major provisions in the bills.” Imagine that! When you tell people what the thing is really about, they think about it differently than the way the media tell them to!

Anyway, you are (mostly) journalism students, so you should be more interested in news than the average citizen. You are, at least, engaged humans who care about what’s going on in the world. So I’d like you to go to the Pew Research Center and take its current news quiz. Click here for the quiz. Please do the quiz before you read the results and commentary on this Pew website.

And then please post your results and any comments in the dialog box below. I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.

El Peez
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