True, most people are woefully ill-informed about politics, and it takes mental effort to swim against the deluge of celebrity event coverage, sporting results, and so on to actually find your position within the political landscape. It takes even more effort to form a view which has not already been badly tainted by the media through which you were informed in the first place.
Passing a pop-quiz of politics is also meaningless, I would think. A pop-quiz level knowledge of politics is about what many people achieve, and it is this pop-quiz level of knowledge that is pandered to in political commercials, which focus on the sensational and try to paint inherently nuanced political issues in bold colours to suit their particular agendas.
There is no point sitting in ivory towers and bemoaning the fact that people are so ill-informed, so as I see it, the challenges are (a) to make real politics interesting and engaging to the average person, without taking recourse to sensationalism and exaggeration (now theres a challenge indeed! any ideas??) and (b) to level the playing ground for political advertizing, so that the battle for minds is not based so heavily on the funding of the players.
