Hedges is kind of an asshole.

  Hedges’s opinion of the American public is best defined as cynical. He lacks faith in the decision-making abilities of the majority of the nation’s population, and he simplifies our image into something that unfairly represents us as a whole. In his eyes, we are big, mindless children.
  People aren’t without their own unique experiences to shape their feelings, completely independent of political rhetoric. A single mother doesn’t need literacy to convince her that one politician is more sensitive toward her specific situation than another, and will therefore be a better candidate in her opinion.
  Maybe if everyone were brought up as motivated to learn as Hedges, the problem would not be as broad-spanning. But people are largely a product of their environment, and if the tools aren’t there to use and the people aren’t there to encourage them to be politically-active citizens, it isn’t their fault, and it should be looked at with more sympathy than derision.
  The definition for literacy supplied in this article loosely requires a person to be grounded in a text-based world of news, not merely capable of reading. In his opinion, one can be literate but still rely on the image-based world of FOX News and campaign slogans to make their decisions for them.
  Hedges quotes a statistic describing the percentage of American families who did not buy a book last year. Although impressive, what the statistic fails to consider is the amount of those individuals who perhaps appreciate the joy of reading but not to the degree of being willing to buy a book, instead opting for library books or a subscription to a favorite magazine. Maybe it is true that few read the sort of sophisticated documents that are as intellectually stimulating as he would prefer, but this does not make them illiterate.