Election 2024: For Many Voters It Will Be a Fact-Free Choice
In a crucial election the news media are ignoring civic illiteracy. That's making it worse.
Comparative politics isn’t Americans’ strong suit, not least because most don’t have a great grasp on the facts about their government, much less how it stacks up against others around the world. It’s not hard to explain. Civics education has been declining for years, as has the public’s knowledge of the basics, like how many branches make up the federal government and who picks justices for the Supreme Court.
The same is true for geography—knowing where other countries are on the map—and lately, voters’ attention to international news. It’s striking after America’s two decades of shooting wars “over there.” But don’t decry teachers and textbooks as the culprits behind civic and geographic literacy’s slide. The media are playing their part in dumbing down what Americans understand about their own country as well as the rest of the world.
The facts are straightforward. A survey by the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation published last month captures the national cluelessness. The 2024 presidential race put its implications in bold face. With Donald Trump prevaricating about presidential powers while promising to be a dictator on day one, purge the Deep State, and wreak vengeance on his enemies, the campaign couldn’t be a better example of what’s at stake.
The Chamber Foundation’s findings aren’t a surprise. Its survey polled 2000 Americans last fall. The conclusion: more than two-out-of-three couldn’t pass a junior high school civics test. The details speak for themselves. Only half of those polled could identify Congress as the place laws are passed; 33 percent didn’t know there are three branches of government; and over half couldn’t give the number of members in the House.
Compared to earlier surveys, an optimist might say, things are improving. In 2011, 71 percent of Americans couldn’t identify the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. But the problem isn’t just that voters remain ill-equipped to sort a demagogue’s cockamamie claims from the usual campaign rhetoric. They also lack the facts to help them understand what their ballot choices mean for American national security as well as the rest of the world.
A Washington Post survey just after Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014 revealed only 16 percent of the 2066 Americans polled could find Ukraine on a map. That rose to 34 percent in 2022 as Vladimir Putin’s threats and ultimately, his invasion captured attention. The uptick was hardly remarkable. Despite massive news coverage, three-out-of-four Americans still couldn’t locate the country under attack in Europe’s first major conflict since World War Two.
Does the voters’ ignorance of civics or geography matter? After all, they pick candidates based on far more than whether their potential choice over-seasons his oratory with obvious lies or speaks without a geopolitical grasp. Pollsters and pundits say it’s inflation, jobs, partisanship, crime, and migrant crowds that are top of mind today. Who’s to argue with the political industry’s experts whose commentary and tuchuses respectively fill the daily editorial pages and the chairs on nightly cable news?
The fact is, despite its voluminous coverage of the 2024 campaign, the news media are ignoring the major deficit in the public’s understanding of government and its democratic processes. Not knowing the rudiments of the federal setup, or which continents are where has consequences. The Founding Fathers made the point 235 years ago. What Americans knew or didn’t was embedded in their discussions of how the democracy ought to work.
Thomas Jefferson, for one, didn’t mince words. Commenting on the new Constitution in 1789, he took its ratification as “proof that wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government.” After his first term as President and presumably further enlightened by the experience in office, Jefferson made clear an ill-informed citizenry meant trouble ahead. “The people are safe depositories of their own liberty,” he wrote in 1805, “and are not safe unless enlightened.”
Odds are Jefferson would have recognized the consequences of civic illiteracy today. Studies that demonstrate its impact abound. From the National Civics Foundation and the Annenberg School of Journalism to business organizations like the Chamber, researchers have identified how the public’s ignorance of fundamental facts is helping fuel disengagement, a polarized society, and rampant disinformation, whether the source is a presidential candidate or Vladimir Putin’s trolls.
To the extent the news media have paid attention, their reporting is sparse, to say the least. Some outlets have targeted media literacy—the ability to tell disinformation from the real thing. For journalists, that’s understandable as well as a worthy effort: public trust in the media is declining and its credibility is at stake. But disinformation is just the tip of the civic illiteracy iceberg. On that score, the news media has done little to smarten up Americans who desperately need some basic facts.
From disengagement to gullibility, the impact of civic illiteracy on the news business as well as the country isn’t hard to discern. Over a third of news consumers polled last year during the Reuters Institute and Oxford annual study of the global media market said they sometimes or often avoid the news altogether. Put bluntly, for the media business, what the public knows or doesn’t is a competitive issue as well.
As the 2023 Reuters Institute Oxford Digital Media Report put it, “When it comes to news, audiences say they pay more attention to celebrities, influencers, and social media personalities than journalists in networks like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat.”
The same appears true for Americans’ trust in the cable news menagerie of so-called political strategists, advisors, former pols, and assorted commentators whose endless opinionating fills prime time versus reporters delivering hard news.
Sara Shriber, an analyst at CIVICScience, suggested as much two weeks ago. “CIVICScience data (see graphic) show that those who follow political commentators are more likely to trust them than not. Forty-eight percent say they value their opinions, and 46 percent trust them.”
With some estimates of political ad spending forecasting a 30 percent jump over 2020—to $16 billion—this year, more than half of the election campaign bonanza will flow into broadcast, cable, and local TV coffers. News industry executives could do their audiences as well as the country a service if they dipped into their tills in 2024 to go after the civic illiteracy deficit.
There obviously are no quick or easy fixes. But programs that explain, say, where Ukraine is on the map, why courts and their judges can hold presidents accountable, and how many house of Congress are under the dome on Capitol Hill wouldn’t hurt.
After 50 years in the news media (thank you, Kent, for recognizing that media is a plural noun), it pains me to agree with you. The collapse of the industry’s economic foundations, the overcrowded information market and other factors have pushed news platforms to promote what might be called reportorial rubber-necking, highlighting the latest sensational tidbit or outburst, regardless of its importance, over the boring information a democracy demands.