http://www.postgazette.com/pg/04217/356443.stmSurvey: Rush, Moore preach to choir
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
By James O'Toole, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Rush Limbaugh's listeners and viewers of the Michael Moore film "Fahrenheit 9/11" inhabit parallel partisan universes with sharply distinct perceptions of political reality.
The National Annenberg Election Survey, conducted last month, found that the audiences for the conservative broadcaster and the liberal filmmaker were roughly the same size. Both groups tended to be better educated and more affluent than the population as a whole, but beyond those similarities there was almost no overlap between the two.<snip>
In the survey conducted from July 5 to July 25, roughly 8 percent of those interviewed said they had seen the Moore film, while 7 percent said they had listened to Limbaugh's broadcast in the previous week. Among the 5,051 adults surveyed, only 12, or one-quarter of 1 percent, were Limbaugh listeners who had also seen the Moore film.
The Annenberg analysts said that 41 percent of the movie's audience said that it had made them think worse of President Bush, but they noted that 60 percent of those were Democrats to begin with. Similarly, the independents who said the film made them think less of Bush tended to be more liberal than most independents and more likely to have voted for Al Gore in 2000.
The survey found that so few Republicans had seen the movie that it was impossible to draw meaningful statistical conclusions about them -- although the almost complete lack of a GOP audience was noteworthy, if not surprising, in and of itself.<snip>