Democracy Has Prevailed.

February 16, 2008

Saturday Morning Fact-Checking

I found this at Crooks and Liars:
Five Times As Many Americans Think The Sun Revolves Around The Earth Than Believe Oil Co’s., HMOs, Are Honest.
It leads back to a blog called the The Daily Irrelevant. It starts:
In a recently released Harris Poll survey, 79% of American adults believe the sun revolves around the earth. I am not making this up.
They should have checked their own link. It goes back to The Smirking Chimp:
In a recently released Harris Poll survey, 21% of American adults believe the sun revolves around the earth. I am not making this up.
And the Smirking Chimp should have been a little more careful as well - here's the Gallup poll in question and here's the part about the Sun:
Probing a more universal measure of knowledge, Gallup also asked the following basic science question, which has been used to indicate the level of public knowledge in two European countries in recent years: "As far as you know, does the earth revolve around the sun or does the sun revolve around the earth?" In the new poll, about four out of five Americans (79%) correctly respond that the earth revolves around the sun, while 18% say it is the other way around.
3% don't know. That's scary on its own.

But even corrected, the original point is still interesting to ponder. Roughly the same percentage of Americans believe that the Sun travels around the Earth as believe that the oil companies (or tobacco companies) are honest.

7 comments:

Sherry Pasquarello said...

oh god! i have to go bang my head into the wall now!

Richmond K. Turner said...

People is so dumb! Everyone knows that both the earth and the sun actually orbit the moon.

Anonymous said...

I wonder how many Americans believe the mullahs in Tehran are honest.

But what does that matter...all they do is fund and arm terrorists, defy the international community, and kill your soldiers through proxies in southern Iraq.

Instead you people verbally destroy your president and so-called "big oil" on an hourly basis. I don't like greedy CEO's anymore than the next guy, but let's face it...they aren't much of a threat compared to the real evil out there.

Oh God, please bless Israel. I'm losing faith in the USA as its citizens turn to reality shows, liberal-biased news, and the cult of Barack Obama.

Anonymous said...

John K. says: Another typical left wing kook series of statements. They all begin the same way: Everyone in the world is lying except for them.

Anonymous said...

See, Dayvoe? Just because you call your post fact-checking doesn't prevent hysterical extreme rightist lie-mongering.

Social Justice NPC Anti-Paladin™ said...

Lets see the poll questions. What percent of the polled were democrats?
Maybe I would believe this if it came from someone slightly credible like the New York times.
Crooks and Liars is a echo chamber for self important progressives that purges any comments that disagree with them.

This sounds like the "More women are victims of domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day of the year." story.

Too good for progressives to check.

Anonymous said...

Mein Herr;

Now I am concerned about you - your reading comprehension is approaching that of John K (not something to emulated, won't you agree?).

The source of the poll numbers is GALLUP.

The point of the blog posting (if I am reading dayvoe correctly) is that CROOKS AND LIARS GOT IT WRONG.

Please do your homework more carefully before commenting. You'll look like less of an idiot that way.

And you might need a better (or at least more recent) example than the Super Bowl/domestic violence hoax. Look at the dates. Dr Sommers deconstructed that particular urban legend more than a decade ago.

not-Shitrock