Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

Apathy, blogging, the news, and United States elections

I don't read blogs quite as much as I used to, especially the major ones. I don't post on them as much as I used to either, and I comment less frequently as well. I still listen to talk radio, but not nearly as much as I used to. I find myself turning the radio off and driving in silence, or switching to the F.M. band to listen to classical music. I watch the news on television less often too, avoiding the regular network news altogether, and skimming over CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. I read newspapers far less frequently than I have over the past couple of years, including the online sites.

I haven't quit reading newspapers. I haven't quit watching television news. I haven't quit reading the news online. I haven't quit listening to the news on the radio. I haven't quit listening to talk radio, and I haven't quit reading or posting to blogs. I've just reduced the time I spend doing it all. I find myself thinking about what I read, hear, and see much more than I used to, but oftentimes I wish I could just turn it all off.

Somehow I don't think I'm alone…

According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, there are over 6.5 billion people living in the world. 303.5 million of those people live in the United States. Nearly 6.5 million of those people live in the State of Washington. Twenty eight percent of those people live in King County (where I happen to live), and just over half a million live in Seattle (where I work, but don't live). According to the Census Bureau's 2000 National Sex and Age Population Estimates, roughly 20% of people in the United States are 13 or younger. In April of 2000, over 209 million people living in the United States were 18 or older.

Quacktrack, the worlds largest browsable blog index, keeps track of blogs with the help of the many players of the game BlogShares. The Quacktrack index is largely hand edited, with blogs being removed if there are no current posts (no posts in the last six months). There are over 5.8 million blogs indexed, but only about 488 thousand of those have demographic information in the index. Of those, there are roughly 159 thousand reported to be produced by bloggers from North and South America, about 97 thousand of which are from bloggers in the United States.

Of course these blog statistics are based upon self reported demographics as well as what the players of BlogShares have actually bothered to "vote" into the index. Some bloggers give no demographic information or false demographic information deliberately, and some BlogShares players choose not to vote blogs into the index for their own reason. Some bloggers also have more than one blog. Still, if the demographic information in the Quacktrack index is a reasonable sampling, then there are roughly one million blogs produced by people in the United States.

That's an awful lot of blogs, and an awful lot of people with opinions, but far fewer than one percent of people living in the United States are bloggers. If you assume that children under the age of 13 aren't blogging in significant numbers (after all, most service providers have a restriction on what a child under 13 can do online) the percentage of people who are bloggers works out to less than two percent.

Quacktrack's non demographic categories are a bit harder to dig a representative sample from. For one thing, the BlogShares rules for demographic voting are considerably simpler and more straightforward than for other categories. If a blogger reports demographic information either in their profile, on their blog itself, or in a location that's easily reachable from the blog itself, then a player can vote the demographic categories. The only other thing that's required for a vote to qualify for a demographic category under the rules is that a single post must have been published in the last six months.

The other categories have specific requirements that are a bit harder to satisfy. There must be significant content. That generally means at least five posts on the topic in the last six months. Category votes are moderated by more experienced players, and must be approved by a moderator before the blog will appear in the Quacktrack index under a category. Generally a good rule of thumb is "if the blog would satisfy someone looking for content in that category" then the vote is acceptable. This prevents a blog that's about knitting from being listed as a political blog for example — unless the blog also contains significant political content.

Having said that, of the roughly 5.8 million blogs in the Quacktrack index, only 16,713 appear in the index under the category Politics, and 6,731 under the category News. Those numbers aren't additive either. Many blogs categorized under Politics are also categorized under News. It's also hard to tell with Quacktrack whether the numbers that appear on the category nodes include the subcategories or not. Except when dealing with blog demographics, the BlogShares voting rules make it clear that just because a blog is about a particular sub-category doesn't mean it's also about the parent category.

Even with less than two percent of adults blogging and the relatively small percentage of blogs covering news and politics there are still a lot of blogs out there. Add to that a few thousand newspapers and there's a lot of reading material.

Nobody I know of has enough time to read more than a small portion of it on a daily basis. Quality will have to substitute for quantity.

A quick sampling of television news ratings shows that on average about 24 million people watch network television evening news every week. For cable news viewers, the number is closer to about 1 million, at its peak. It's usually much lower. The cable number is harder to work out because the data I could find is presented in graphical format without a data table. Even so, based on the numbers I could find, it seems that fewer than ten percent roughly twelve percent (one of these days I'll remember some of that math I learned in school) of adults in the United States are watching the news on television whether it's network news or cable news. Those numbers are based on weekly ratings. If the daily ratings are one fifth of that, it works out to fewer than two around two and a half percent!

According to Wikipedia, there were over 5.8 million votes cast in the popular vote for President in 2000. Based on the Census for that year, less than three percent of people of voting age in the United States cast a vote for President that year. The Census data that I looked at don't distinguish between citizens and non-citizens, but the numbers are still appalling.

Compare that to the size of Rush Limbaugh's audience. In 2005 Arbitron ratings indicated a weekly audience size of 13.5 million listeners. Even if you assume that those ratings can be divided by five to get daily ratings, Rush's audience amounts to roughly 46 percent of the total number of people that voted in 2000!

When I think about these numbers, it's not hard to understand the direction our nation has taken. When I read about a politician that's such a habitual liar that she can't tell the difference between "I misspoke" and "I told a bald-faced lie", it seems obvious that she figured the nation was too apathetic to catch her, or care when she was caught.

I suppose when I think about it this way, it's obvious why the news media spends so much of their small time budget covering such important political issues as whether Britney Spears is wearing underwear this week or which famous celebrity is "bravely" going into rehab for their latest drug addiction. This is why the death of Anna Nicole Smith, a sleazy tramp with a hot body and dissolute lifestyle, kept the nation captivated for over a month, but if a week goes by without any bad news in the war on terror it's glossed over completely or ignored by the major media. The American populace is more interested in that sort of crap than they are about what their government is doing to them.

It also explains why we have many of the problems we have in our government. It explains how a man that can't govern his own animal instincts can be elected Governor of a state the size of New York. The people don't really care about what he does, they'd far rather watch Simon Cowell belittle an aspiring singer with more guts and talent than they even dream of having. It seems that schadenfreude trumps morality, and apathy runs our country.

Staying informed takes effort. Effort that a lot of people aren't apparently willing to invest. There's a huge amount of information out there, and a lot of it conflicts with the other information available. Sorting out the truth requires more time than any of us really have.

Pick a topic related to modern politics, any topic, or select a politician. The chances are, if there's a national issue involved you can find a multitude of books about it, and a lot of those books will make what appear to be perfectly reasonable arguments for completely opposite points of view. At between twenty and thirty dollars a pop, you can spend a small fortune trying to keep abreast of just a few political issues and politicians at your local bookstore. That's if you have the time to read them all.

And time is probably one of the real problems. If you're like most adults I know, you probably work outside the home at least thirty hours a week, if not forty or even fifty or more. Throw in time for a commute — mine's about ten hours a week — and there's even less time. We all need sleep. The recommended amount is eight hours per day, but many of us get by on five to six, or roughly forty-two hours a week. At a rough guess I'd say that leaves about seventy hours a week for other activities, give or take a couple of hours.

According to the national archives, The Constitution of the United States of America is a four page document consisting of 4,543 words, including the signatures and takes roughly a half an hour to read. Sitting down and reading an average newspaper — every article — could take a couple of hours. Just watching the network television news in the evening, on one channel would take a half an hour, with about ten minutes of that filled with commercial advertising. How much real information can talking heads impart to you in twenty minutes? And how much of that is really just spin rather than objective reporting?

Is it any wonder that as a people, faced with instant gratification, mindless entertainment, and salacious trash masquerading as situation comedy that so many of us are so apathetic about government that only three percent of us can be bothered to even vote? Is it any wonder that of that three percent, so many don't even try to keep sufficiently informed to recall that Hillary Clinton is an outrageous liar, or that John McCain did his best to win amnesty for illegal immigrants to this country that by most estimates outnumber the voting population, or that Barack Obama has ties to some people with questionable racist attitudes and political ideas?

I've asked in the past whether politicians think we're stupid. It's always interesting, to me at least, to hear what they have to say today and to compare it to things they've said in the past. This is what's so unfunny about Hillary Clinton's recent bout of "misspeaking". This is why it was so believable when John Kerry said "I actually did vote for the 87 billion, before I voted against it". Even though they know that what they say is on record somewhere, politicians also know that less than ten percent of us are watching, and most of them simply won't remember what they said. Charley Reese was right.

When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

Just 18/10,000th of a percent of our Nation's population runs things. Eighteen ten-thousandths! This tiny fraction of our population was selected by fewer than five percent of us. Many of us despair of ever changing the system, of correcting the ills that have come of a too-powerful central government more interested in running our lives than doing its real job. Just imagine the possibility for change if we can ever wake up the other ninety five percent.

I think I'll keep writing.