In some circles, Rush Limbaugh's listeners (Dittoheads, as they call themselves) are assumed to be knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. I confess, over the years, those people I knew who were regular Limbaugh listeners didn't impress me, largely because they weren't readers. So imagine my surprise at finding this July 6, 2008 New York Times article about Limbaugh with this amazing piece of information:
Limbaugh’s audience is often underestimated by critics who don’t listen to the show (only 3 percent of his audience identify themselves as “liberal,” according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press). Recently, Pew reported that, on a series of “news knowledge questions,” Limbaugh’s “Dittoheads” — the defiantly self-mocking term for his faithful, supposedly brainwashed, audience — scored higher than NPR listeners. The study found that “readers of newsmagazines, political magazines and business magazines, listeners of Rush Limbaugh and NPR and viewers of the Daily Show and C-SPAN are also much more likely than the average person to have a college degree.” [emphasis added]I suspect that if you let most NPR readers in on this secret, it would cause an epidemic of strokes.
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