Tuesday, May 8, 2007

People are reading after all

I knew there was something I liked about the place. For the second year in a row, Seattle topped the list of America's Most Literate Cities in 2006. So maybe my previous observation about the lack of books in Seattle homes doesn't tell the whole story. My other two favorite cities, San Francisco and Boston, came in at #9 and #11, respectively.

The political component of the survey is also very interesting. It seems to suggest that people who learn about the world through newspapers, books, and the Internet soured on Bush much earlier than people who learn about the world through television. The top 15 Kerry-voting cities ranked, on average, more than 20 places higher than the top 15 Bush-voting cities on most literacy measures.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Most of the cities that you cited in this study, on the whole, display more incidents of violent crime and other social ills than Bush areas. Furthermore, if you look at a map of the country that shows the county breakouts in the last POTUS election you see Kerry voters in urban clusters and the overwhelming majority of the country is red.
Literacy is an interesting point to discuss but when you consider that while the NY Times occupies a certain status and reading it likely makes someone more literate it means little due to the Times' repeated screw ups and journalistic lapses (not to mention obvious bias) in its reporting. The Nation is another seemingly high-brow pub yet it's writers are seriously hard core leftists. Fly over country might not spend it's time reading such sources or spending time on the Daily Kos but that doesn't make them less informed as voters.