My son laughed when I told him that you put Doonesbury and Mallard Fillmore together on the editorial page, presumably to counterbalance right with left. We both felt the contrast of the two strips was unfair to Mallard. Trudeau, with his sometimes overwhelming details and careful story lines, certainly contrasts with Tinsley's crude drawings and questionable connections.
When I looked at Mallard talking about the relative knowledge of Rush Limbaugh's audience and the audience of NPR, I passed this off as strange but possible since I had no idea of how this information was obtained. However, when Tinsley decided to use the same theme a second time, I thought I would search to see what was behind the story he referred to in the New York Times.
First, I found that the date of June 29 as indicated twice in the strip was incorrect. The actual date was July 6, but not in the news section. It was in an article about Rush Limbaugh in the Times Magazine (see www.nytimes.com). The quote from the Times did say a Pew Research report indicated Limbaugh's listeners were more informed than NPR's listeners and I found this to be reprinted in a number of conservative Web sites.
This led me to go to the original report from the PEW Research (http://people-press.org/report/319/). The article is a bit long and contains a lot of data. I doubt that I could adequately summarize the report within the word restriction of a letter. However, I could not find a statement such as was quoted in the Times.
I did find that both the audiences of NPR and of Rush Limbaugh are rated knowledge-wise about the same in the PEW report with the NPR audience 2 percent higher than that of Limbaugh. Given the nature of statistics, the data essentially shows no difference. Limbaugh has given the impression that his listeners are not the brightest by coining the term "Dittoheads". I suspect this was done to get those on the left to dismiss his audience as unsophisticated when all along he knew this was not the case
The PEW report points out that about 8 percent of the U.S. population (69 percent are male) list Limbaugh as their primary news source and about 28 percent (50 percent are male) do the same with NPR. The report also points out that the most informed people get their news from the DailyShow/Colbert Report with the PBS NewsHour and the O'Reilly Factor also ranking high but that people who indicated their primary news source was Fox News, blogs or morning news ranked near the bottom. (Have fun with this data - Jon Stewart did.)
That summary really does not do the report justice. However, I think it points out that when an obvious partisan comic/opinion writer uses a reference, you might want to question the accuracy of the reference. Tinsley (and all writers) has a responsibility to check original sources especially if he uses the same source for multiple presentations.
