While I generally am not a fan of internet quizzes, I thought this Pew news quiz was worthy of a blog post. The idea is to test your general knowledge about current political IQ, though I would say that the facts being tested are more “nouns” than ideas (e.g., When did the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor vs Why did the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor?). I had issues with the question of which talk show host is supporting Barack Obama, as that’s ranks on the political pole of importance next to who wears lapel pins. Oh please.

Of course, the real news isn’t about my score, but the score of the average test taker coming in at a dismal 50%. My optimistic theory is that Americans are so busy working and taking care of daily business that most of them simply don’t have time to pay attention to the finer details of the political arena. This is why we’re able to get at least half of the questions right, but may not know exactly who the Senate majority leader is, simply because that position is so removed from our own daily lives. Of course, the flip side of that coin is that we’re busy, but only because we’re watching American Idol and watching YouTube instead of the reading the New York Times or the Economist.

Breaking down quiz results by age, the results show that there is a strong correlation between poor performance by younger test takers (30%) and better results by older test takers (60%). Given that the older generation are the ones still reading newspapers and the younger generation is online, there may be some truth to the idea that we will simply consume our information from the medium that is most familiar.

That or we can blame rock and roll, video games and pretend it’s not our problem.