Quiz Show Journalism

Over at our Monastery of Miscellaneous Musings, Dean has posted a video (which I confess I watched a few days earlier) where the Reason Magazine team makes fun of the ignorance of the John Stewart rally crowd. It's all about how they can't tell the difference between "Kenyan" and "Keynesian". Har har har. This weekend, while reading Bradley Wright's Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...and Other Lies You've Been Told, I came across a section where a journalist claimed that Christians didn't know the Bible because he went to the beach and asked a bunch of them questions about it that they couldn't answer correctly.

A whole book could be written about the insipid trivia quiz show that is the relationship between Sarah Palin and the press.

Who cares? Who cares if evangelicals can't tell you the difference between Numbers and Judges? Who cares if John Stewarts' fans know who John Maynard Keynes was? And why is Sarah Palin stupid because she isn't going to win on Jeopardy!?

People know what they need to know. As a Catholic who participates in Church activities and goes to Mass every week, I'm not sitting in the Catican every morning cramming for an exam that's going to be given to me by some journalist while I take a walk around Mission Bay. The John Stewart ralliers shouldn't have been expected to have prepped for the event with a group study session on economics.

"Let's see here. They don't know who was the mother of Miriam and they can't tell me the number of years between the writing of Deuteronomy and Proverbs. Yep. Just what I expected. Christians are ignorant."

Image by Quinn Dombrowski, used under its Creative Commons license.