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How much (more?) do we know?

Thursday, April 19, 2007

If you’re reading this column, chances are you’re the kind of media-consumer who knows exactly who the US Vice President is. But are you and your fairly knowledgeable peers better informed than a couple of decades ago? I ask because in those intervening years, two news revolutions have happened, 24-hour cable TV news, and the internet. And what difference have they really made? Well, very little, it seems.

At least that’s according to the latest research findings of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Comparing today’s citizens with those it surveyed in 1989, the Center reports that today we are just about as able to name our leaders, and are just about as aware of major news developments. Without a doubt technology has dramatically changed where Americans get their news - but not how much we know or understand.

There are some exceptions, as of course there always are in surveys – and they are not encouraging. What change there is in public knowledge tends to be in the direction of less, not more. For instance 68% per cent of those surveyed appreciate that the US is operating a trade deficit with the rest of the world, compared with 81% who knew that truth in 1989.

My fascination, however, with such studies is not just in time-period comparisons, but also in the drilling-down that’s possible into the information gathered on contemporary behavior.

TV viewers who scored the least in their knowledge levels were (oh really?) regular watchers of the Fox News Channel. Knowledge levels were a lot higher among regular viewers of PBS’s The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. But Jim’s viewers were topped - and this is a pleasing zinger - by the regular audience of John Stewart’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on Comedy Central.

But on that Vice Presidential question – it’s dispiriting, in lots of ways, to learn that only 69% know that the Veep is nowadays Dick Cheney. Eighteen years ago, some 74% knew it was … Dan Quayle.

Something wrong here, surely.

By the way, you too can take the Pew news-knowledge test – at http://pewresearch.org/newsiq.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should say my own test-results pegged me as better-informed than 77% of the general population. I’m not sure if I’m happy with that or not.

THE ABILITY - AND WILLINGNESS - TO TAKE IN NEW IDEAS lies at the heart of that old warhorse (some would say workhorse) of a play, Inherit the Wind, which is now revived at New York’s Lyceum Theater, starring Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy (pictured above). Many of us will harbor memories of the venerable film version – directed by Stanley Kramer, with Spencer Tracy and Frederic March – but Doug Hughes’ Broadway direction reasserts the sheer theatricality of the piece.

The McCarthy-period authors, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee, loaded their play with much oratorical argument in classic courtroom-drama format (a sadly still-current tit-for-tat: fundamentalist Creationism versus freedom of thought extolling Darwinism, exponents of the latter being the writers' stand-ins for suspected, and witch-hunted, communists). But Hughes enforces the conflict with the pounding melodramatic momentum of a mob lynching – one which hurtles to a provocatively inconclusive end.

A breakdown in Dennehy’s character (modeled on the deeply pious, and often admirably populist, Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan) is presented in highly stylized fashion, with the help of a single spotlight from above. It’s a vast improvement on the movie’s more naturalistic and hence unconvincing treatment of this pivotal unraveling. (The mental crisis is brought about, incidentally, after the character is pointedly cross-examined – in the way our current sitting President has not been – about his claims that God speaks directly to him.)

The night overall, though, belongs to Christopher Plummer as the attorney modeled on free-speech advocate Clarence Darrow. I had felt privileged enough to have seen his Tony-winning tour-de-force in 1997‘s Barrymore - but the now 77-year old Plummer blew away even that triumph with this latest wry, joyful, world-weary but insistent performance. The perceptive mischief he played with his part - and the witty Plummer disposition that showed through - reminded me of his treasured (by me) but somewhat ungrateful of-the-cuff swipe at his highest-grossing movie, calling it “The Sound of Mucus”.

It’s not to say that others on stage exactly lagged behind Plummer. I felt Dennehy was more interestingly layered, as the glad-hander with rigid beliefs that finally snap, than critics have given him credit for. And the ensemble cast engaged me fully in the change-fearing community of Hillsborn, USA. Notably, Andrew Weems skillfully avoided the mock-a-rube crudity that could be all-too-tempting when his juryman character, Mr Sillers, admitted to not working at the Bible or at Darwinism, but simply “working at the seed store”.

Weems also told me after the show (and yes, in more full disclosure, he happens to be a good friend of mine) that one of director Hughes’ fresh touches was to broaden out the music from a single and obvious song in the original show (“That Old Time Religion”) to encompass a lot of foot-stomping hymns with which the audience could, and did, join in. My companion for the evening, Anne Van Rensselaer commented shrewdly: “They brought out the inner redneck in us”.

A COARSE FOOTNOTE TO THE “DECLINE IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE” debate that’s raged erratically after Don Imus’ eventual but inevitable flame-out. As I walk out each morning, I’ve long monitored a local bar’s somewhat sad efforts, by chalk-board slogans, to draw in customers. And I later share its daily come-ons in email exchanges with Ron Feemster the education-and-society writer and journalism teacher.

We’ve each groaned over examples like “Problem? Solution – Beer! – inside” and “Roses are red, violets are blue. We’re in here drinking. Why aren’t you?”

Today’s message, I regretfully report, reads: “Wanted: Sexy Slut Barmaids. Apply within”.