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There are some days that Captain Louis Renault from “Casablanca” could be a media writer.

Because he’d certainly be “Shocked, Shocked!!!” to find some things out about the media landscape, circa 2007.

This week’s Renault-worthy headline? “Poll: Republicans and Democrats View Media Differently”

You think? Really? According to an Editor and Publisher article:

A new Gallup poll released today show a wide gap between how Republicans and Democrats view the mass media. Nearly 3 in 4 Republicans say the media is "too liberal." But overall, Gallup's director Frank Newport reports, "less than half of Americans, regardless of partisanship, have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the mass media."…

More than twice as many Americans say the news media are too liberal (45%) rather than too conservative (18%). But Newport adds: "Americans' views of the bias in news media are highly related -- as would be expected -- to underlying political orientation."

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We’ve got people consuming less media. We’ve got people consuming more diverse media.

Remember when media wasn’t diverse or consumed or any of that? When it was just, um, books? (You know, back when we use to trudge uphill seven miles through the snow to get to school. Both ways.)

Well, sorry, but there’s some bad news about those, too. According to a study that came out today from the Associated Press and IPSOS, roughly one in four Americans didn’t read a book last year:

One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.

So this is a ‘bad news’ story, right? Something about apathy and attention span and all that? Not according to Dr. Michael Gross, Associate Vice President at Ipsos and a glass-half-full sort of fellow.

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“Nobody phones the paper expecting to find a hero anymore,” according to the current New York Review of Books essay “Goodbye to Newspapers.”

And yesterday’s Harris Poll seconds that notion, as Editor and Publisher points out:

Hang down your head, journalist -- your fellow Americans don't think your career is much to be proud of.

The annual Harris Poll measuring public perceptions of 23 professions and occupations came out Wednesday -- and you can find journalists in the Bottom Ten.

It’s conventional wisdom, of course, that journalism has truly taken a beating in terms of esteem and prestige in recent years. Journalists take a back seat to used car salesmen and ambulance-chasing lawyers nowadays, prompting a sigh from the ink-stained crowd as they order another brew and talk about the Good Ol’ Days.

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"Do you believe America needs to declare a countrywide time-out and have a national group hug, and just think about our future for at least a few weeks quietly and without interference from politicians? Sixty-three percent of you responded that you agree it is time for that countrywide time-out."

--The always-embraceable Lou Dobbs, reporting the results of his weekend unscientific poll.

A new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll today suggests that just 27 percent of Americans approve of the way Congress is doing its job. That's down from a 36 percent approval rating in January.

This poll comes out the day after the Associated Press reported on a Pew poll that found that 49 percent of respondents "correctly answered that Nancy Pelosi was speaker of the House." Another data point found that about three-fourths of respondents knew that the Democrats control the House.

The two polls left me wondering: If fewer than half of those polled by Pew even know the identity of the Speaker of the House, what -- if anything -- should we make of peoples' opinions about Congress? To what extent are they responding to what Congress is actually doing, and to what extent are they just sharing a general dissatisfaction with politics in general?

I turned to Kathy Frankovic, Director of Surveys for CBS News, and Mark Blumenthal, otherwise known as the Mystery Pollster, for some answers.

"This probably is more of a general measure of what people think of that institution called Congress," he said. Blumenthal told me that there is a sizable chunk of respondents who are plugged into what's going on and are responding based on that, but that there are also a fair number that are responding based on something far more vague.

One can, he noted, extrapolate larger trends if one looks closely at the data – for example, if liberal Democrats have turned sharply against Congress, you can read something into that. But a headline alone leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

Frankovic said that the drop in approval for Congress could probably be traced to the failed immigration bill. "I'd put the blame on the fact that there has been a lot of debate and nothing passed," she said. "It probably isn't policy as much as the perception that they bicker, they debate, and nothing gets done."

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There is a new Pew Research Center poll of Muslims in America out today. What are the findings? Your answer to that question depends on where you're reading about it.

If you pick up USA Today at your local newsstand, you’ll find out that “American Muslims Reject Extremes.” If you check out the Washington Post, the headline there tells you “U.S. Muslims Assimilated, Opposed to Extremism.” If you check out the Washington Times, however, you’ll discover that “Young Muslims Defend Suicide Attacks.” The Los Angeles Times says that the American Muslim community is “Mostly Moderate, Not Monolithic.”

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According to a recent Gallup poll, a large majority of Americans – 95, 94 and 92 percent, respectively – would vote for a presidential candidate who is Catholic, black or Jewish. There is slightly more opposition to a female candidate, but 88 percent of Americans still say they would have no problem voting for a woman. Below that, the list gets a little more interesting.

Twenty four percent of Americans say they wouldn't vote for a Mormon – which is a pretty big number, and presumably bad news for Mitt "Mormon!" Romney.

But 30 percent say they wouldn't vote for someone who was "married for the third time" – here's looking at you, Rudy. And 42 percent say they wouldn't vote for someone who is 72 years old, which happens to be the age that a certain Arizona Senator will be on inauguration day. Gay candidates fare even worse, with 43 percent opposition, though not as bad as atheists, whom 53 percent of Americans say they wouldn't vote for.

Of course, your age and marriages are only a problem if the press corps discusses them. So far, there has been much more focus on Romney's religion than Giuliani's past or McCain's age. That's starting to change – Romney is starting to get a lot of (bad) press for his, um, evolving positions on social issues – but polls like this underline how important it is for candidates to control their media coverage. McCain, for example, can probably win the Republican nomination. But a generic "72-year-old" candidate apparently can't. So McCain needs to limit the degree to which the press corps talks about him in those terms.

There are two big stories out there this morning: The emergency brain surgery of Sen. Tim Johnson and a report that Princess Diana's death was the result of an accident, not murder. Should Johnson die or step down, South Dakota GOP Gov. Mike Rounds will name a replacement. If Rounds names a Republican, the Senate shifts from Democratic control to a 50/50 split between Democrats (and those who caucus with them) and Republicans. When such a split occurs, the vice president casts the deciding vote. And that vote would effectively give Senate control to the Republicans.

Johnson's condition, then, has extremely significant political ramifications. As for the other big story of the day – the Princess Diana report – not so much. It's a nine-year-old tragedy, there is no new information, and the story has no real significance today. So what we have when we look at the media landscape is a classic battle between hard news in the form of the Johnson and soft news in the form of Diana. And we thought it would make for a great test of what CBSNews.com readers are most interested in – as well as how well we can predict what they'll click on. So to that end, we've put a poll up in the top left corner of the Public Eye main page that allows you to vote on which story will be most popular today. Cast your vote and stay tuned – we'll discuss the results at the end of the day.

UPDATE, 5:00 PM: The day is winding down, and, in what really must be considered good news, the Tim Johnson story is resting comfortably in first place. Princess Diana didn't even take the silver – that went to "Possible Leads In 'Suffolk Strangler' Case," with the Di story coming in third. I'll admit, cynic that I am, that I expected Di to take the top spot. Luckily, a lot of you aren't as cynical as me. 44 percent of respondents said the Di story would win the day, but the majority – 56 percent – took the Johnson story. Optimists, we salute you.

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Longtime Public Eye readers are well-aware of our wary and weary disposition toward political polling. They drive too much of the campaign coverage, are too pervasive and oftentimes suspect. Still, they are an established part of the political process and it won’t be long before we start seeing an avalanche of surveys pertaining to the 2008 presidential election.

Too often, though, the polls come and go with relatively little focus on their accuracy. That’s why we were pleased to see today’s effort from Carl Bialik, the “Numbers Guy” for the Wall Street Journal. In a free online offering today, Bialik seeks to see which pollsters were on their game in 2006:

I crunched the results from pollsters on dozens of races, and found that some did indeed appear to be more accurate than others. I'll share my results later in the column, but before I do, I want to explain why I'm more reluctant to crown a winner than some of the polling firms were in their PR. The science of evaluating polls remains very much a work in progress.

Turns out that it’s about as easy to judge accurate polling post-election as it is to explain the methods used in conducting them in the first place. More from Bialik:

While data are now easier to obtain, there remains disagreement about how to calculate accuracy. Is picking the winner enough? Most experts agree it isn't, and focus instead on measuring how close the predictions were to the actual spread -- the difference in percentage points between the two candidates. But what if a poll accurately predicts an election will be decided within a one-percentage-point margin, but incorrectly identified the victor?

It’s well worth a read and points to several other sources for judging accuracy. With so many polls and pollsters infiltrating our understanding of political races, the more scrutiny, the better.

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Tired? Yeah, us too. It was a long night. One aspect of the coverage-of-the-coverage that's struck us this morning is the notion, as laid out in a New York Times story, that the networks exercised "an unusual degree of caution" in calling the House of Representatives for the Democrats. Perhaps the caution was "unusual" compared to two years ago. But was it a surprise? Hardly. The cult of being first has faded somewhat from the news race Tired? Yeah, us too. It was a long night. One aspect of the coverage-of-the-coverage that's struck us this morning is the notion, as laid out in a New York Times story, that the networks exercised "an unusual degree of caution" in calling the House of Representatives for the Democrats. Perhaps the caution was "unusual" compared to two years ago. But was it a surprise? Hardly. The cult of being first has faded somewhat from the news race – now calling a race a few minutes after the competition seems like a relatively small setback. What the networks are really terrified of is being wrong – that's what people remember, after all. What if CBS News had called the House for the Democrats, and then it turned out that those making the call had their numbers wrong? Can you imagine the criticism the network would have faced? In today's environment, in which mistakes are used as evidence of hopeless ideological bias, you'd be nuts not to be cautious.

Moving on, but related: Did anyone (besides Stelter) notice this tidbit about the National Election Pool from the Los Angeles Times? "In the middle of its election coverage, Fox News — one of the members of the consortium [of five networks and the Associated Press that commissions the national exit polls] — announced that it was going to stop relying on the exit-poll data because its decision-desk analysts had discovered a Democratic bias of six to eight percentage points in many areas after comparing the survey results with the actual vote." It's not surprising that networks would distrust the exit poll data after the mess in 2004, when the exit polls suggested that John Kerry was on its way to victory. Last night's early numbers, which leaked to a number of blogs, were skewed towards Democrats to such a degree that the networks didn't trust them. “We were told the numbers simply looked way out of whack,” Allison Gollust, spokeswoman for NBC News, told the New York Times. “They just seemed too far off of expectations."

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