Ilya Somin, who posts regularly at the Volokh Conspiracy, has written extensively about this topic. He refers to it as "rational political ignorance."

It is essentially the same paradigm as third parties-
"I won't vote for a third party because they can't win. They can't win because people like me won't vote for them."

Tautalogies are always rational, they are just also vapid. People have no control over national foreign policy because not enough will become educated enough to express strong preferences to their elected officials.

So it goes.

I am a woman, but my reading preferences are more in line with what type of news men read than women.

I really have no interest in celebrity gossip-although I would probably stink at naming sports celebs as well. I read sports, but tend to follow the local stuff-I don't care much for professional sports.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the default position of the American people is isolationism. It can take the form of disinterest or it can take the form of the sort of internationalism that basically boils down to “let George do it” but it's isolationism nonetheless.

I agree wholeheartedly with you here Dave. Being someone who relished his politics and global history classes, I can tell you I stood alone with enthusiasm for these courses. I am no history or political science major, I just love global current and historical events.

Most of the students I personally talked to about these subjects couldn't wait for the semesters to be over with. That fact (as I see it) is a sad state of affair not only internally for our country and its citizenry but also externally when it pertains to foreign policy.

Unfortunately, we're about 70 years past the time when isolationism was a practical paradigm for the United States.

This is where I disagree. Isolationism should never have been a foreign policy and I can say that knowing hindsight. In my personal view, I think that if you wanted to remain involved in global affairs you need to be in them. I believe a pivotal moment in U.S. history came when Harry Truman decided that the Soviets were not worth dealing with because they were "Commie Bastards".

That belief began a decades poor foreign policy belief that communism could be won by building bigger weapons, rather than trying to appeal to people by diplomacy, cooperation, joint interests.

Just my two cents. :)

Well, that's TWO thoughts. OK, sue me. ;-D

While news junkies may sneer at those who don’t share their avocation for public affairs, the fact of the matter is that there’s not much reason for the average American to spend his precious free time reading about, say, the intricacies of the situation in South Ossetia. Not only does it have a negligible impact in his life, his knowing much about that topic would have precious little impact on public policy.

Which to bend the topic just a little, is why issues such as gas prices are so important for the Republicans just now. To get a rise out of the electorate, there is a need to pick issues that directly affect them, and fuel prices certainly do that.

...I’m only peripherally aware of local news even though I’m an avid consumer of national and international news.

You and me both, brother.

With these understandings, I find it extremely difficult to keep up with significant events in anything like "real time", and from the data shown in the post here, it seems not to make very much difference to many of us.

This was brought sharply to my attention when I was privy to the President's Daily Briefing for a short time. A number of situations were being tracked there that had not seen and never did see the MSM spotlight. We live surrounded by circumstances and events that we have no knowledge of, and that would scare the daylights out of us if we did know.

Many of these events and situations shape future outcomes very directly, yet we the public do not get the facts, or get a boiled down, sanitized version that removes much of the alarming aspects. I do not think it is a matter of "protection" of the fragile public's sense of security that causes these stories to be muffled, but more that the rolling on of events and decisions most of the time changes the situation for the better or worse before a sensible presentation can be put together to inform the public in a forthright and meaningful manner.

Then, all hell breaks loose!

We the public are not kept informed, and do not usually have access to the sources that are well informed and have valid opinions on a critical situation, except by accident or unusual circumstance. We live by the ragged tidbits that happen to fall off the table much of the time, and are then spun up for publication by the MSM.

Today, it is blogs run by news junkies and a few highly connected and perceptive individuals and specialists that find stories, break them, and persist in following them until they are given fuller treatment in the media. More power to them!

We are thus asked to make our voting decisions in the presence of significant noise and uncertainty, and to form our opinions on the performance of our representatives without full possession of the facts, quite often with a time delay of months or years--if ever.

But we try: we read the papers; we watch TV news; we listen to radio commentators; we buy books; and eventually we think we know enough.

We do not, and never will.

Unfortunately, we're about 70 years past the time when isolationism was a practical paradigm for the United States.

[T]he fact of the matter is that there’s not much reason for the average American to spend his precious free time reading about, say, the intricacies of the situation in South Ossetia. Not only does it have a negligible impact in his life, his knowing much about that topic would have precious little impact on public policy.

Ilya Somin, who posts regularly at the Volokh Conspiracy, has written extensively about this topic. He refers to it as "rational political ignorance." See his recent post on British ignorance of American political institutions. He writes:

None of this means that the British public (or the American one) is "stupid." Political ignorance is not stupidity. Rather, the problem is that it is perfectly rational for even most highly intelligent citizens to be ignorant about politics.

The cited article has links that will take you to some fleshing out of what he means by "rational political ignorance."

I should note that I’m a distinct outlier, in that I’m only peripherally aware of local news even though I’m an avid consumer of national and international news.

Ditto, but I keep meaning to pay more attention to local news and blogs. It just seems so trivial though. I mean how can local zoning ordnances compare to issues of Pakistani succession when you know the incoming president has a small nuclear arsenal, a long established national emnity with (also nuclear) India, a country with plenty of fundamentalists just waiting for a chance to grab power or sow chaos, and an intelligence agency that seems to be an outreach program of Al Qaeda?