Political scientist Tim Groseclose has a book on media bias in which he has tried to quantify and measure political leaning in politicians and voters. His book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, points to a study showing a difference the decisions of young voters after three months exposure to either the NY Times or the Washington Times. Exposure to the NY Times actually resulted in more liberal views from the readers in the study.

Mr. Groseclose says he didn’t want to write just another book claiming to expose bias among reporters and broadcasters. He wanted a scientific book that proposed solutions. Among those solutions is determining your own political quotient. On his website, you can take a 40-question quiz based on congressional roll-call votes in 2009 to see what your PQ is and how it compares to other politicians. This is not an easy quiz. The first two questions are a bit deep in the weeds, but I trudged through them to get a 7.7 PQ.

Even though this is all fairly interesting, I doubt it will change many minds. I hate thinking so cynically, but how many of us think about our civil responsibilities at all? Maybe a book like David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge will shake us up a bit or one like Mark Steyn’s After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, if we haven’t already written him off, but modern political argument for most American voters seems to be built up from our preconceptions. We believe what we believe, and you’re a brainwashed nut-job if you don’t agree with us.

And yet the Christian in me still holds on to the hope that even this can get better. Maybe I can’t help believing America is exceptional in this way, that all of us really can have liberty and justice.

I finished reading the history book from Kvalavåg (one of my ancestral homes in Norway) about which I wrote the other day. Most of it is stuff that wouldn’t interest you much, but there was one amazing paragraph in the section on the German occupation during World War II (my translation follows):

One of the leaders of the 14-man German troop was Konrad Grünbaum. He was actually of Jewish origin, and came from the city of Furth. His civil occupation was metal work, and he had been an active member of the Socialist Workers’ Youth. Before the war he himself had been in Dachau concentration camp. He had been accused of illegal work and sentenced to three years’ punishment. Through an error he came to Norway in ̀́41 and was promoted. Grünbaum himself said later that he had had very good relations with the people in Kvalavåg while he was there, up until 1943. People used to call him “the Englishman” because he spoke only English with the people. Others called him “Grandfather.”

What a bizarre story. I can only imagine the terrors he must have suffered, worrying in his bed that somebody in Personnel would notice his ethnicity and denounce him. And after the war, what must he have felt, when he pondered the cosmic lottery win that saved his life when so many others perished?