Media barely literate...anyone surprised?

An analysis carried out by a language monitoring service said Friday that Gov. Sarah Palin spoke at a more than ninth-grade level and Sen. Joseph Biden spoke at a nearly eighth-grade level in Thursday night's debate between the vice presidential candidates.

The analysis by the Austin, Texas-based Global Language Monitor said Palin, governor of Alaska and the GOP vice presidential nominee, used the passive voice in 8 percent of her sentences, far more than the 5 percent used by the Democratic senator from Delaware. [...]

The two candidates were nearly even in total number of words spoken. The normally voluble Biden restrained his tendency to ramble by uttering just 5,492 words during the 90-minute debate, versus 5,235 for Palin, Payack said. [...]

Here's the breakdown:

Grade level: Biden, 7.8; Palin, 9.5 (Newspapers are typically written to a sixth-grade reading level.)

Sentences per paragraph: statistically tied at 2.7 for Biden and 2.6 for Palin.

Letters per word: tied at 4.4.

Ease of reading: Biden, 66.7 (with 100 being the easiest to read or hear), versus 62.4 for Palin.

This sure explains a lot about what we read and hear from our esteemed media mavens. Some years ago, I had dealings in a retail computer business with public school teachers. At the end of it, I had to find someone who could speak in polysyllabic words, complex sentences and with genuine sophistication of thought. The teachers, bless their hearts, had lowered their communication ability to that of the grade 4 kids, and couldn't seem to get out of the mode in the rest of their lives.
So, if media pundits write and speak at the "grade 6 level" on a regular basis, it may follow that that's the level of their thinking as well. Certainly, that would be consistent with the intellectual level presented in much of their verbiage. What you get is what there is...