–> Reading the article, I have to disagree with you. It goes on to say that he is a long-standing Christian, mentions “fallacious Internet rumors and radio talk-show gossip” which cause the “confusion”, and says that the figure is worth noting because it is a higher percentage that Americans overall.

[begin sarcasm]
But, Dan, that’s elitist. That’s lecturing. You’re saying YOU KNOW MORE THAN THE READERS. That you’d get up above them, and like a priest lording it over his congregation, tell them they’re wrong and you have the truth! Isn’t that attitude why old media is dying, compared to BLOGS, where, hey, if someone thinks Obama is a Muslim, we’re going to explore that story together with citizen-journalism no matter that the insider liberal Washington dinosaur MSM may try to suppress it!

Wouldn’t the proper Web 2.0 thing be to set up a discussion – “Is Obama A Muslim Terrorist – what do YOU think?”. Lots of pageviews, for Google Adsense! Also a wiki page “The Obama Muslim Connection”, where the crowd can edit it. With RSS feeds to Twitter each change.

No?
[end sarcasm]

I really shouldn’t do this. It doesn’t do any good .

but, never mind, it’s just a 150-word blog post, not an editorial or anything.

Also, the Chron reported last week on the it doesn’t matter angle, by interviewing area Muslims.

But with a circulation of 1.2m, it only reaches 10-20% of the voters in the state. So this goes back to our regular argument here Dan: most assuredly, there are limiting returns to how much can be spent to disprove rumors. (aka “you can’t unfool all the people all of the time.”)

The UT poll has yet to cross-tab out the data (the press release promised it would). Pew did an Obama-is-muslim back in June, concluding

I’d be curious for the UT poll to break down by education/demographics (which they have), and also by media literacy (which they don’t).

and I don’t know why news sites don’t quiz readers more often– it’s a more fungible interaction, than, say, mudslinging with a bunch of anonymous cowards.