I bet she cannot name the prime minister of Canada, or name the capital city of British Columbia, or the population of neighboring Yukon territory.

I bet she would take more than 2 minutes to find Syria or New Zealand on a globe.

Her major was Journalism, and she can’t name anything she reads?

I betcha it’s “people magazine” that she reads.

UK newspapers are hit by the internet’s delivery of news and 24-hour rolling news in our broadcast media. But they’re still taken seriously here and regarded as important.

Oh, and a cool kid who still reads newspapers? My son, Christian Herron – not only creates electro-music as Delay Tactics, and puts some fantastic, if sometimes wierd, pix on flickr.com (delay_tactics), but reads the independent, a pretty serious UK paper.

Best regards, America.

Clark Herron

The question is about what newspapers and magazine did she read to form her WORLD view. If Palin said she read American publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post without naming some serious non-American publications, it would be a very poor answer.

All three of those publications are sub par when it comes to foreign affairs and concentrate mostly on U.S. affairs. And if you base your world view off of only American publications, your world view can’t be much more enlightened than Palin has seemed so far. How hopelessly American-centric.

Try at least reading some U.K. publications (The Economist FTW!). You might even want to consider Foreign Affairs (a journal, but it’s still in print. Yay!). I would also strongly encourage all of you to read Al Jazeera’s English-language Web site. Before all of you go casting stones about Palin, maybe you should bring up some publications that actually spend a lot of resources on covering the world outside the U.S.

Reading The New York Times alone does not give one an informed world view. It might certainly, however, contribute to ones hubris.

I mean would you honestly go to Comic-Con and ask people who their favorite super heroes are?

Or, say, what if your name was Michael Bolton and someone asked you what your favorite Michael Bolton songs were. Wouldn’t the only logical answer be, “I guess I just kind of like them all?”

And if you look purely at print, then even higher correlation with age, voting and reading print newspapers.

So, if you conclude that Palin’s non-specific answer means she doesn’t read a newspaper, online or print, nor any other media, than she’s more like non-voters than voters.

Wonder when she first voted in an election?

And BTW – I think Steve (first comment) meant William KRISTOL, the pundit…not William (Billy) Crystal, the actor/comedian. Right?

Of course, it’s also true that millions of Americans still read print newspapers. More than 95 million of them do, in fact. Every day.

What’s more, those old fogey print newspapers provide about 90 percent of the revenue behind all newspaper reporting. And, by and large, newspaper reporting is the basis for the vast majority of all other forms of news and commentary, from broadcast news to the Huffington Post to Twitter. Even the news the cool kids are reading originates, by and large, in newspapers.

In other words, most people “read newspapers.” Even if they never once get ink on their fingers.

But, still — funny.