Atrios notes a strange Annenberg poll that is written up in a completely misleading way by the AP:
Is Annenberg This Stupid?
WASHINGTON (AP) — About 40 percent of Americans say they consider talk show host Bill O’Reilly a journalist – more than would define famed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward the same way, according to a poll conducted this spring.
Only 30 percent said Woodward, who broke the Watergate story with Carl Bernstein, was a journalist. More than a quarter said talk show host Rush Limbaugh was one, while one in five said they considered newspaper columnist George Will to be a journalist.
Poll respondents were simply asked, “Please tell me if you think (the individual named) is a journalist or not?” The question made no specific reference to differences between reporters and commentators….
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said the results of the poll suggest the public defines the word “journalist” far differently than those in the press define it.
This poll tells us nothing about who people believe is a journalist. It just tells us who has name recognition. This question reads like a test and people are going to try to give the “right” answer. What a stupid stupid poll.
He’s right — it’s almost a pure test of name recognition. The fact that (a) more people know who Bill O’Reilly is than Bob Woodward and (b) they acquiesced to the interviewer’s label of “journalist” has no clear implications for what the public thinks about journalism.
Update 6/14: Writing on Wonkette, Fred Becker rightly mocks Howard Kurtz’s story about the poll:
It turns out that Kurtz has written the story backwards. You know who those polled say they consider to be a journalist? People on the TV! Peter Jennings, say 79 percent of the respondents, followed by Mike Wallace (64 percent), Katie Couric (48 percent).
If that’s not proof that these results are driven by name recognition, I don’t know what is.