There is an assumption, probably particularly among those who cover the news and those who read it, that Donald Trump’s legal travails are common knowledge. We talk about things like the potential effects of a Trump conviction on the 2024 presidential election with the assumption that this would be an event that rose to the nation’s consciousness, triggering a response from both his supporters and detractors.
But this is a sort of vanity: Just because it is interesting to us certainly doesn’t mean it is interesting to others. Polling released by CNN on Thursday shows that only a quarter of voters seek out news about the campaign; a third pay little to no attention at all.
As it turns out, even major developments often fly under the average American’s radar. New polling conducted by YouGov shows that only a bit over half of the country on average is aware of the various legal challenges Trump faces. And among those Republicans on whose political support he depends? Consistently, only a minority say they are aware of his lawsuits and charges.
Yes, I know these people personally. They don’t watch the news, and they don’t even know what Trump sounds like. They still believe the lies they bought into decades ago about the Republicans cutting taxes for them and fighting off the trans movement that they think is just brainwashed kids. All they know of Trump is they liked The Apprentice when it was on TV, which rarely featured him in order to make him seem like an important and dominant figure. That’s good enough for them. They have 0 interest in actual events or facts.
I remember my third grade teacher saying that it was every American citizen’s duty to be well informed. Plenty of quotes from the Founding Fathers about the importance of newspapers and public engagement. I guess they missed that day of school.
Reading newspapers is not a great yardstick for information.
Yes it is. I guarantee you that someone who regularly reads a reputable major daily is going to be better-informed than 90 percent of the public. Your attitude is part of the problem too. The vast majority of Americans are functionally illiterate when it comes to news media and don’t have any idea of how to evaluate credibility and accuracy.
I mostly blame the Internet for trashing the signal-to-noise ratio, but I also blame our education system and the profession of journalism itself for not giving people better epistemic toolkits.