Thanks for the commentary...

Alan Fram continues the AP's new tradition of editorializing news stories, with this interesting dandy stating that the reason that conservatives read less than liberals is due to conservatives wanting "slogans" and not paragraphs.

Book Chief: Conservatives Want Slogans
AP

WASHINGTON (AP) - Liberals read more books than conservatives. The head of the book publishing industry's trade group says she knows why - and there's little flattering about conservative readers in her explanation.

"The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple of slogans: 'No, don't raise my taxes, no new taxes,'" Pat Schroeder, president of the American Association of Publishers, said in a recent interview. "It's pretty hard to write a book saying, 'No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes' on every page."

Schroeder, who as a Colorado democrat was once one of Congress' most liberal House members, was responding to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll that found people who consider themselves liberals are more prodigious book readers than conservatives.

She said liberals tend to be policy wonks who "can't say anything in less than paragraphs. We really want the whole picture, want to peel the onion."

Of course, as you read down, you get to the interesting point: liberals read a median of 9 books per year, conservatives read a median of 8. Now THAT is a result you should be making a big deal of.

The AP put out a second article on the same topic, one which is really going against the grain in that it is pretty balanced, which reveals some deeper insights: women (who are more likely to be liberal) read more than men (who are likely to be conservative); people over 50 (who are more likely to be liberal) read more than people under 50 (who are more likely to be conservative). People who are extremely religious (who are more likely to be conservative) are much more likely to confine their reading to the Bible than those who are not.

So, perhaps it's not that there's anything about conservatism which makes someone less likely to read, but rather a demographic issue.

Of course, to make the hack-job piece work, Fram had to find someone that he described as being extremely liberal to make his charge. So this really begs the question - what was the point of this article.