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Survey Shows That Fox News Makes You Less Informed
A survey of American voters by World Public Opinion shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. One of the most interesting questions was about President Obama's birthplace. 63 percent of Fox viewers believe Obama was not born in the US (or that it is unclear). In 2003 a similar study about the Iraq war showed that Fox viewers were once again less knowledgeable on the subject than average. Let the flame war begin!
Correlation != Causation. This is basic guys, cmon.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
Can you mod an entire article "troll"?
Slow news day? You have to resort to Fox-bashing? Seriously?
Somebody get the machine gun, there's some fish in this here barrel.
If he wasn't born in the States....
Catching your attention where it isn't important. Making you focus on non-issues in order to prevent you from being aware of real issues, etc.
Perhaps it's just a case that people who want their observational biases pandered to are more likely to watch Fox?
Consider the MSNBC viewers; aren't they about the same in bias?
(O'course, there's no helping those who insist that CNN/BBC/PBS are "hopelessly liberal", but that's life.)
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The Mainstream Liberal Media(TM) just doesn't respect the in depth reporting that News Corp uses to expose the Truth(TM).
I think some people may answer in this way because they view such responses as inflammatory rather than holding an actual belief.
Hey samzenpus, if you're going to post a flamebait article anyway, why bother toning it down? The summary headline says "Fox News Makes You Less Informed", but the actual article comes right out and says "Fox News Makes You Stupid".
Now let the flames begin.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
FOX also makes sure to point out any 'controversy' in science stories.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/12/fox_news_bureau_chief_told_staff_to_cast_doubt_on_climate_change.php?ref=fpb
This is just the result of their policies. They probably designed it this way to make people want to watch/read more FOX news. If you are unsure about something going on today you try to learn more, and you learn what's going on in the world by watching the news, right?
Fox news said that it makes me more informed than other news stations. This article must therefore be wrong. *Sticks cottonwool into his ears*
I am sure I will lose some of my positive karma on this one but nevertheless...Are those not watching Fox News doing that much of a better job? Looking at the world that's highly questionable in my opinion
RGdot.com
Slashdot readers are shown by a recent survey to have significantly higher IQ scores than average, yet with higher rates of social anxiety. What is it about Slashdot that makes its readers so smart, yet so awkward?
THIS JUST IN- people who buy the most gas/petrol also tend to have larger cars than average. Scientists are trying to find out why putting more gas in a car's tank causes the car to grow.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
Meh, just about all news (and politics, for that matter) is entertainment. I've started listening to some of the conservative AM talk stations, like Savage Nation and the Laura Ingram show. I thought it was pretty hard to believe that people could fail to see the satire in the Colbert Report, but now I'm not so sure... Mike and Laura are every bit as funny! Stephen Colbert has the easiest job in comedy, he just needs to listen to people like them and repeat the same thing to a different audience.
Perhaps people who believe that Obama was not born in the US are more likely to be watchers of fox news, not the other way around?
The flame war should be towards you for posting such drivel! This is neither news, or for nerds. Here's an idea, why don't you just replace your news feed with one from Huffington/Politico, since it appears that's the way you want to go.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
"Study Confirms That Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, etc. Makes You Stupid".
No, really, that's what the article says.
Clinging too strongly to one ideology or another without using your head leads to you being less informed! Fox is just a great outlet for individuals matching this characteristic, but there are others...
You are right, of course. It's not that Fox News makes people stupid, it's that stupid people watch Fox News.
Reminds me of a recent Simpsons episode news helicopter for Fox.
My work here is dung.
People have to separate the channel as a whole from the actual news shows. Their actual news is fairly decent and objective. The rest of the shows on that channel are pure columnist style speculation and opinion however.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Where's the survey of Daily Show/Colbert Report viewers? I doubt we score much better than MSNBC on politics but our marks on puns are sky high.
This will go to hundreds of comments, as people write: "I watch something else, so logically that means I are smart."
The hospitals should prepare for an onslaught of shoulder strains from the liberals all attempting to pat themselves on the back.
And the pure gold, is that you can come back tomorrow with a study saying that liberals are disloyal by nature, or some such.
Then all the conservatives will have similar rates of commenting and shoulder injuries as their deepest beliefs are confirmed.
And what does this accumplish? Why, confirmation of eyes on pages, so ad revenues go up. Slashdot is a business, after all. Yay!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESGKpMHBSoQ
It's just that his Grandmother is a telling a DAMN LIE! Just because she was actually there when he was born.
She MUST BE STOPPED!
"You are right, of course. It's not that Fox News makes people stupid, it's that stupid people watch Fox News."
You are wrong, of course.
We don't know that Fox News makes people stupid or that stupid people watch Fox or BOTH. No one has done the study.
Let's not replace a lack of understanding of correlation vs. causation with a lack of understanding of logic. (Realising that you don't know for sure that A->B does not mean you now know that B->A.)
That is, unless you've seen a study which shows which way it goes. If you have PLEASE post the link. My money would be on both: Dumb people watch FOX, and then get dumber. (Which seems like it also might be true of CBS, based on one of the links and what I've seen of network news.) But I'm waiting on someone doing a study, before I assume that that's the case.
What the fuck.
We (The US of A) are screwed.
Sorry, but anything having to do with DoucheNet can be roundly ignored.
Left-wing think-tank criticizes Fox news. I'm shocked, shocked!
Advice: on VPS providers
Worldpublicopinion.org founded by Pipa.org
http://www.pipa.org/sponsors.htm
Their sponsors are a who's who of liberal politics.
Sponsors
PIPA's activities have been supported by:
* Rockefeller Foundation
* Rockefeller Brothers Fund
* Tides Foundation
* Ford Foundation
* German Marshall Fund of the United States
* Compton Foundation
* Carnegie Corporation
* Benton Foundation
* Ben and Jerry's Foundation
* University of Maryland Foundation
* Circle Foundation
* JEHT Foundation
* Stanley Foundation
* Ploughshares Fund
* Calvert Foundation
* Secure World Foundation
* Oak Foundation
* United States Institute of Peace
Everybody except people who watch Fox News already know this.
No real surprise that Fox promotes a POV and slants its reporting (a lot) to pander to specific demographic.
The big surprise is that MSNBC came out as the most accurate. Based on the obvious slant that they put on their reporting it just means that their viewers agreed with more of the answers to the questions that the survey's designers picked.
What we need now is a study to determine how the questions in the survey biased the results.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
There is a difference, and a significant one at that, between all of the following statements:
1) Fox News makes its viewers less informed. (What headline said, which is impossible.)
2) Viewers of Fox News tend to be less informed. (What headline meant.)
3) Fox News makes its viewers more mis-informed. (What summary said.)
4) Viewers of Fox News tend to be more mis-informed. (What summary should have said.)
5) Viewers of Fox News tend to believe stuff that I think is hogwash. (What summary meant.)
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
That graphic when Fox was covering the Columbia was the last straw for my watching them for even breaking news coverage.
During the Iraq Invasion CNN had the best video in the middle of the night, Fox had the best military analysts during the day, but since '03-04 Fox got way worse.
Fox's coverage of John Paul II's death, funeral and the election of the new Pope was also godawful, I ended up watching the Catholic Channel for that, they had real historians and would shut up during speeches in English and explain what people were saying in Latin. Fox, CNN just blathered on and on.
Fox was also able to junk up the memorial of Reagan and the funeral too.
CNN now is a shell, MSNBC is just as partisan as Fox, TV news really has died off for me personally.
That a survey designed year after year to bash Fox News isn't at all biased in design, intent, delivery, execution and conclusion.
Good job liberals .. more FUD for the fodder. Mixing cool aid is Fun !!
Hurricane Island Outward Bound
OB
A fair number of conservatives denounce Fox News anyways. Granted, some of those who declare that they don't get their news from Fox will in the same breath declare that all liberals get 130% of their news from MSNBC and NPR; but nonetheless, uninformed Fox News viewers are not indicative of all conservatives.
A more interesting question at this point would be to ask how relevant Fox News is. I didn't see any information on there as to what the actual market share is; has Fox News actually grown in terms of viewers over the past 5 or more years, or has it been retracting (as many have)? A lot of people now claim to get a large portion of their news from blogs and other online sources; if that is true than the correlation of poor information with Fox News viewership is not necessarily that significant with regards to the American public at large.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It's not about correlation, causation, polls, or journalism. It's about shameless, mindless, easy click-whoring. Slashdot pageviews must be running a bit off-pace here at the mid-month mark, so Taco's decided to set that right with a quick snark-fest. Slashdot may make the Leftie noises tech-hipsters crave, but they gotta make a payroll just like any other right-wing capitalist organization.
fox news, its target demographics, or their metrics constitute news for nerds or stuff that really matters...
Good people go to bed earlier.
Study Confirms That Fox News Makes You Stupid
A new survey of American voters shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources.
Come on, give me a break.
misinformed, nor mislead, does not mean your LITERALLY STUPID. It doesn't even necessarily mean your naive. It just means that you've been misinformed. Many of the designers for the first atomic bombs were mislead by the govermnent about their exact purpose, does that make these guys LITERALLY STUPID? No, it doesn't. People are misinformed every time you turn around, all day long. It doesn't make them stupid.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
a large part of the Faux News audience is folks who think they know it all already, and are only seeking reassurance of their obvious superiority.
they won't be angered by this, because they are only good for words of one or two syllables. just nod at the rest.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I've taken a survey of everyone who appeared to have read the article and came back to post. My scientific observation is that it has made you all Stupid.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
slashdot less and less. Over the past 10 years that I've visited, the stories are becoming less technical and more biased/political. This site would be better off returning to its roots. Its why endgadget is now my place to go for tech/gadget news.
Let's take a peek behind the curtain for a moment...
Who did this survey and who are they funded by...
If you follow the $$ you will find the Tides Foundation is one of the principle donors to the organization who did the survey,
Who is the Tides Foundation? This is one of George Soros funding arms.
Who hates Fox News.. George Soros.
What does this have anything to do with "News for Nerds?" It would be swell if Slashdot would be a bastion of apolitical discourse... Too much to hope for, it seems.
So does the US government.
Thankfully there is Wikileaks.
I'm glad that's settled. Now we can all get on with our lives.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'm not saying all the viewers of Fox news are moronic idiots...
It's just that a lot of moronic idiots watch Fox News.
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
I;d think you get similar results. They are a pretty insular much I surmise from the quality of replies.
...having already made up their minds and not wishing to be confused with the facts, they go there to have their preconceptions re-enforced.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
This is so stupid. Fox doesn't even profess Obama was not born in the US. And people confuse Fox's news segments with say pundit commentary. Fox get's a much of its stories the same place everyone else does, the wire services. I recall being on a forum where someone was ranting about a Foxnews story, how bad and biased it was etc. Turns out it was an AP story posted on Foxnews. Some of those questions are clearly slanted. "72 percent believe the economy is getting worse" things like that are relative. You can come up with a pundit or someone to throw out numbers to say as a comparison to this or that the economy is up but no one in their right mind thinks the economy is in good shape. So if I, regardless of where I get me news, live in a state that is losing jobs at a higher rate than another state those figures mean nothing. My observation is that the economy is getting worse. It doesn't make me "stupid" because I'm going by what I observe. I find it interesting that most of those questions are politically charged. Ask them math questions then come see me.
Not really actually. I am not a regular fox news watcher but I was working in an office where fox news was on tv in the coffee room so I was "exposed" to it.
This was a few years ago and they were blasting a story on there "news" shows about how Obama went to a madrassa (religious muslim school) as a child. They ran this story non-stop. Seeing this story on their news I thought it was factual and told me friends did you know Obama went to a madrassa - isn't that crazy?
Well it turns out the story wasn't factual and while they covered the story non-stop they issue a 5 second retraction that few probably saw.
This is the kind of news fox covers - they pump up some story from an obscure source that fits their ideology. They say as reported by _insert obscure news source_, and then its true and not their fault if it turns out to be wrong its the obscure new source's fault.
My favorite part of Fox News is the polls they conduct, and how they are always very skewed toward the conservative angle. Because liberals DON'T WATCH FOX NEWS. The only liberals watching Fox News are comedy writers.
By defining truth in their own way, they are causing a correlation. Consider this 'result'...
"72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit"
Apparently, the inferrence to be made is that the health reform law will not increase the deficit. This cannot be supported by facts because the law hasn't even been implemented yet. There are still regulations to be made. The CBO did do an estimate, but it stopped short of showing the long term effects. And this doesn't even address the necessary changes to the law whose need will become clear as people decide not to purchase the mandated coverage and instead pay the much cheaper fine.
Anyone who claims that the health reform laws will not affect the deficit is at least as big of an idiot as Steve Ducey.
If you're watching unbiased news about America then by all means don't watch an American new network. The closer you are to the conflict, the more likely you're going to have a charged opinion of it. If you want to get emotionally fired up about whatever side you're on, thats one thing, but if you want cold as close to objective news watching then find a network as far detached but still good quality.
I always have a preference for the BBC news channel personally, but that's just from my liking. I find the major American News channels to be way to sensationalistic for me to have a good objective opinion on a story.
Bye!
I know I can't prove it to you, and for good reason-- but I voted McCain. Fox isn't News, it's Anger. I feel better represented as a republican by Stephen Colbert.
I'd take the Onion over Fox any day. If you're going to be fed misinformation, is it too much to ask to be able to enjoy it?
Completely serious. If you want news, you're looking at BBC and Wikileaks.
I read The Economist each week and also watch Fox News. Fox News has a better presentation. I do not watch the opinion/freak shows such as Beck/Hannity/O'Reilly, the morning junk etc. But I think their anchors are fairly intelligent. Cavuto asks some good questions and clearly has an econ background of some sort. Shep Smith is also fun to watch, quick on his feet, and asks good questions. Bret Baier is good and so is the Sunday show anchor. Very good.
CNN has become a joke with bumbling anchors, with the exception of Wolf. But they even took Wolf and tossed him into some sort of multimedia Tron thing that makes me seize.
CNNi is pretty good, but I prefer The Economist for my international fix.
I am a news junky, but extremely well informed. And I prefer Fox News.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
If well the article says less informed than consumers of other news sources, maybe the title wording is more correct. Maybe for giving biased, partial, or plain wrong information you know actually less watching it than passing that time i.e. walking or sleeping. Is nice to see negative amount of information in real life.
http://xkcd.com/552/
Wow! Amazing, Fox viewers do not have the same opinions about various topics as those who watch networks which favor the expansion of state power.
I do not watch Fox News (or any other television news). However, most of the things that they use as examples of Fox News viewers being stupid are opinions, not facts. The very first one they list is the large number of Fox News viewers who think that the stimulus legislation lost jobs. Well, the U.S. economy has lost quite a few jobs since the stimulus legislation was passed, so it is perfectly legitimate to blame the stimulus legislation. However, that is an opinion. There are people who believe that the U.S. economy would have lost more jobs if the stimulus was not enacted. That is also an opinion.
Basically, the site in question calls their opinions "facts" and then belittles those who disagree with those "facts".
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Its ironic that the original study was showing effects of "misinformation". Becuase this slashdot article is a piece of "misinformation in itself.
What's important to keep in mind, is the following facts:
1. The study only picked specific areas of news to analyze.
it so happened (just by accident. yeah, sure) that the majority of areas they picked, showed a bias of misinformation one way.
2. If you actually dig into the specific areas individually (Never forget the mantra, "Show me the raw data!")
you will find areas with the majority of misinformation from the other side. such as :
"Daily consumers of MSNBC and public broadcasting (NPR and PBS) were higher (34 points and 25 points respectively) in believing that it was proven that the US Chamber of Commerce was spending money raised from foreign sources to support Republican candidates. "
here's another reference on the research.
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brunitedstatescanadara/671.php?nid&id&pnt=671&lb
oddly, the top article at slashdot references a DIFFERENT article on worldpublicopinion, about the same study.
Oooooddddddd....
Fox news is fun if you use it spot and score fallacies. Some of the high scoring items are:
Appeal to probability
Argument from fallacy
Fallacy of necessity
Sometimes it just mind goggling when a single arguments get multiple fallacies going.
Here are things the survey says are false and the percentage of Fox News viewers that believe it. My comments are in parenthesis.Most questions are opinions or confusing definitions not facts. It is obvious that this people that made this survey intended it to show people don't agree with their interpretation of the facts.
91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs (Opinion. We have lost jobs since the stimulus was passed no way to say whether the stimulus helped or hurt)
72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit (Opinion)
72 percent believe the economy is getting worse (Opinion. Based on what measure?)
60 percent believe climate change is not occurring (Opinion. At least this one has some scientific backing)
49 percent believe income taxes have gone up (Confusing definition. People know the tax cuts are expiring and haven't been renewed)
63 percent believe the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (Confusing definition. Cuts to whom and how much)
56 percent believe Obama initiated the GM/Chrysler bailout (Confusing definition. Bailout happened during 2009. Bush may have started it but Obama didn't stop it.)
38 percent believe that most Republicans opposed TARP (First somewhat good question. Could be phrased "Most Republican Congresspeople voted against TARP. You could actually verify this. Just saying Republicans doesn't mean elected politicians)
63 percent believe Obama was not born in the U.S. (or that it is unclear) (Second good question. Documents have been produced that show he was born in the US)
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Is truth not truth for all? -- Natira, "For the World is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky", stardate 5476.4.
Man, what a trollapalooza this story's gonna be - a story by a troll submitted by a troll, about a troll.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
How about Fox Business News with Andrew Napolitano and John Stossel?
Faux News seems a more appropriate moniker.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
I love Slashdot. It has so many good articles on tech. But I think BS political posts like this detract from the value and dignity of the site.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
link to the actual survey summary not alternet's screed review of same: http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brunitedstatescanadara/671.php?nid=&id=&pnt=671&lb=
Generally the survey shows that misinformation is happening BROADLY (not quite "Fox News is teh pUr3 Ev1lz!"), and there is a correlation with Fox News - "The effect was also not simply a function of partisan bias, as people who voted Democratic and watched Fox News were also more likely to have such misinformation than those who did not watch it--though by a lesser margin than those who voted Republican."
I read the full report at http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/dec10/Misinformation_Dec10_rpt.pdf ...and I don't see that MSNBC comes off smelling any better (although the linked-alternet blog explicitly says so).
-Styopa
... I'd be reading kuro5hin.org ..
And like alternet is soo fuckin nonbiased...
Fox is good for _Special Report_ and _Red Eye_, and Fox Biz for Judge Napolitano. Beyond that and net aggregators I have very little need for broadcast or cable news. Besides, the most important stuff going on today is best documented by Zerohedge and the Market Ticker, possibly add Barry Ritholtz to that (though I find he's a bit too chummy with the bankster thieves and more interested in understanding and cashing in on the corruption than in exposing and ending it).
And if Jon Stewart started really skewering Obama et al the same way he did so entertainingly with Bush, it might be worth watching again regularly instead of via the occasional clip. Oh, and no more Cheney or McCain jokes, that's just fuckin lazy.
FLAME!!!!
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
The example given is a question about Obama? So you asked a bunch of right-wing conservatives about a democratic leader they have no intention of getting to know?
Maybe it was that Star Trek virus!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Scientists concluded today that water is still wet, and bears still shit in woods.
Obama was born in the US, however he moved to Indonesia and then back to the US in his teen years, he has spent a couple million so far keeping the same sorta college records sealed that are available to anyone looking into Bill Clinton's or George Bush's college years.
There is some though that Obama put down "Indonesian" on his college aid forms to game the system as grants to foreign students were much more attractive than grants for citizen students.
I am not a "birther" nor do I really care where someone was pushed out of their mom's va-jay-jay. But we need to see his college financial aid forms because he could have lied about his citizenship status on the student aid forms meaning he either...
1. Previously Denounced his citizenship, making him ineligible for the office of POTUS.
or.
2. Gamed the system illegally for his own ends, which shows a pattern of not giving a shit about the law and would be a nice black mark on his record and degrade the trust the American people have in him.
So why has Obama spent 1-2 million dollars keeping records sealed that haven't been for previous presidents?
That 2003 study was flawed by one major thing: the list of "facts" on which "Fox viewers" were "uninformed" were latgely either simply false, or defined "informed" as "agreement with the Conventional Wisdom." Such as for example climate change issues: disagreement with carbon-forced anthropogenic global warming was identified as "uninformed".
It isn't, really.
In socialist Germany, we have government sponsored universal health care that is alot cheaper and more efficient than in the U.S. I can go to the doc any time I want to and not have to worry about being able to pay the bills.
In socialist Germany, we have a state funded independent news organization that reports important facts from around the world from an unbiased standpoint, instead of reporting on the lives of teenaged girl-stars or the most recent, spectacular highway robbery.
In socialist Germany, the state grants us legal protection from getting fired without good reason, unemployment benefits, parental benefits, grants for families with children, education sponsorships, the list goes on.
In socialist Germany we have low unemployment and a trade surplus.
You know, capitalism isn't everything. Basically, the extreme capitalism that the Republican Party and Fox News preach only means that the power is transferred from the government to the corporations and their owners. Problem is that corporations have even less interest in the public than the government. Corporations only want to make more money.
The vast majority of europeans are astounded by the fact that so many americans are so spiteful and disapproving of the best president they've had in a long time. Obama is fighting for reforms that intend to help the middle and lower income classes and yet you people demonstrate against him to keep the system in place that clearly favors the wealthy. And all of this while juggling the tremendous deficit and two wars that Obama inherited from his precursor, and an economic crisis sparked by just these wealthy allmighties which the taxpayer had to step in for.
Us here on the old continent can't understand why in the world anyone would ever vote for the Republican party that so clearly is the political wing of the wealthiest 5%. The only thing that can explain this discrepancy between european and the broad american view on what is going on in your own country, is the tremendous influence held by misinforming "News" Corporations, such as Fox News.
Hear hear. To claim that MSNBC is somehow "just as bad" as Fox News is to invoke a false analogy. Instead of doing journalism, Fox News arguably is trying to destroy it.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Thank you Slashdot for finally giving me the needed push to stop visiting here. When tripe like this is "reported" here as news I know I'm wasting my time. And there seems to be more and more of this.
TFA says:
"Here is a list of what Fox News viewers believe that just aint so:
91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs
72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit
72 percent believe the economy is getting worse
49 percent believe income taxes have gone up"
No economist can prove that the "stimulus" (exactly which one?) caused job gains or lost. They can speculate, but there is no control to the experiment. Money may have gone to hire various people, but then the unseen effects of the bill (such as fear of future high deficits) may have reduced aggregate demand and caused private job losses. Certainly if one looks at the unemployment rate graph, it certainly isn't clear that it helped much.
We don't know what effect the ACA will have on the deficit because that is in the future. The deficit is taxes in (which is related to total incomes) versus spending out. No one knows what that will be in the future (especially as the regulation of ACA seems to be changing on a day-to-day basis, see the Mini-Med plan rule changes). Again, all we have are predictions.
By the way, if anyone would like to bet that the Federal deficit will be lower in 2015 than now, I'll take that bet on the other side!
"The economy getting worse" is a qualitative statement, not a provable quantitative one. You could believe that GDP is rising, unemployment claims are dropping, yet the large number of mortgage-backed securities still in the banking sector have not yet been marked down to their true value, possibly leading to a second financial meltdown. Or you could be fearing inflation in the future due to quantitate easing, or you could be fearing US sovereign debt crisis due to large future deficits due to Medicare and Social Security costs.
"income taxes have gone up" is a true statement for me - I live in California. Federal rates are still going to go up at the end of the year unless a bill is passed.
..In other news, viewers of Telemundo are more likely to be speakers of Spanish or are bilingual.
Even over here in Europe, "Fox News" is in most mental dictionaries as a current era example for propaganda and misinformation. So the news is that a study confirms it. Again.
The real question is: Is anything going to be done about it?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
There's a difference between ungrounded assumptions of non-experts and the reasonable expectations of experts.
Since it is the opinion of nearly every single unbiased economic expert AND the non-partisan CBO that the stimulus saved and created millions of jobs and helped stop our freefall into a second great depression, disagreeing with these opinions should at least require some facts.
The reality that those who don't want to believe this can cherry-pick, shift arguments and ignore these opinions doesn't disprove them. But it can make people find ideological comfort in *thinking* their disproven - which is the greatest danger of super-partisan outfits like Fox News.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
This is very important. Consider that FNC is the ONLY news channel that will mention the IPCC climate gate scandal, for example. People who watch FNC who would answer no to the question of "does man made global warming exist?" would be considered "wrong" if you are using the IPCC's data as the judge.
As for Obama's birthplace it HAS NOT BEEN PROVEN. The birth certificate exists but they will not produce it. Contrast that with what each and every one of us have had to do multiple times in our lives (you can't even play little league sports without producing your long form birth certificate). Do I think Obama was born in the US? Probably, more because the Clinton machine wouldn't have let THAT one slide than because of anything Obama has produced. I think it's been hidden more because there is something that he's claimed (such as his birth name, parentage, etc) that would be proven a lie and an embarrassment, as in why they also hide his college transcripts to hide the fact he was an affirmative action graduate. Frankly, Obama has only himself and his actions to blame for the fact that ANYONE doubts his birth because they won't take 5 seconds and release a document.
Seriously, if you hate Fox News, go watch MSNBC, you'll be happier.
Corporatism != Free Market
is being used for meaningless political grandstanding and flame bating. All the mass media "news" networks ceased pushing "news" long time ago, and they are just businesses pandering to their particular demographic selling their BRAND, continuing to fool people that there is a difference between political parties and claiming that their political party has "morals". THEY ARE ALL SELLING YOU STUFF - books, lectures, commercials, and other tangible and intangible merchandise! What happened to News for Nerds and Stuff that Matters?
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
Well I watch MSNBC for MY news. And I know Barak Obama was born in the good old US of Mars and that the war in Iraq was not fought over Islam or Weapons of Mass Deception but over states rights! So there, take that Fox.
Be More, Be Manly, The Manly Geek Ubergeek Extraordinaire Blogger: www.manlygeek.com/blog Podcaster: podcast.man
According to http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/about.php?nid=&id=#support, World Public Opinion is funded by the Tides Foundation, which is a pet project of George Soros and Al Gore, among others. There is no love lost between Soros and Fox. I'd take this survey with a block of salt.
The party's over
The study found readers of The Onion were better informed than those that watched Fox News.
It has been my observation that people seek out news sources that
mirror their own notions to begin with.
Successful news sites have figured this out and tailor their
content accordingly.
FOX tends tends towards sensationalism and ignorance and therefore
attracts those kinds of people. And makes a fair piece of change from
doing so.
for all your colonial news. They really don't care what is going on in the Americas from what I have observed.
"The laws of science be a harsh mistress." --Bender
Obligatory: how is this news for nerds?
Let the flame war begin!
Was that your reason for posting this? Eff you, then.
LOL
The CBO scoring that showed it wouldn't was contingent on cuts in Medicare that everyone knows wont be made – congress *just* put them off for another year. The CBO was so concerned about this obvious legislative trickery that they also included scoring for the law without the putative cuts. And it increases the debt. The president and congressional Democrats knew they had a problem with Medicare reimbursement for doctors in the original healthcare legislation. The solution was to split that portion of the legislation out (the so-called "doc fix"), and pass it separately. So a well informed person would likely be correct in answering that question affirmatively. In any event, we wont know the real cost until all the law is fully implemented. Congress can't even answer how many new agencies will be needed to oversee all the moving parts of this law. The cost is just as uncertain.
46 & 2
You have a choice - you can choose from:
- CNN, which provides you with last weeks news,
- Fox News, which says less,
- MSNBC - which has something to do with Bill Gates.
I choose MSNBC.
Slashdot is making me feel more stupid. I mean, seriously? This is the kind of garbage that gets featured here these days?
Between the myth of Osama, or the ravings of O'reilly (I don't care if I misspelled it) or the little cracker preacher man calling for the assassination of the Wikileaks guy, the entire thing is a bad and dangerous joke.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
I just think most people are uninformed, period. I'll put myself into the uninformed as well. I try, but the amount of crap happening and the amount of opinions that are out there make it unreasonable to try to stay current with all things political. If I'm personally interested in a topic I will try to inform myself but otherwise, if I don't care, I simply can't make enough effort to stay current or weed out the facts from opinion.
Most people don't realize or don't want to realize that they don't understand all these topics. They read or hear something on the radio/TV/newspaper and just go with it. I'm making a broad generalization but that's what my experience has been.
Is that people believe everything they hear on the news without looking it up or thinking for themselves. It shouldn't matter, to the individual (non-journalist), if all they say is lies. Everything that happens in a cartoon lies about the laws of physics. What should matter is the individual is intelligent enough to do more research before they vote. But most don't, and its sad.
For journalistic integrity, what they call news IS very important. I'm not a journalist, and don't know if there is any governing body or law, etc, that states "You can't tell people bullshit and call it factual journalism" in which case, there would be a great deal of news agencies in trouble. It also depends on if they are, truly, giving out the right facts but placing it in a different context as to induce doubt in the facts. That's entertainment. But history-, science-, and mathematics-denying is no journalism. (Unless, of course, the studies in question haven't been replicated yet or to an appropriate degree as per academia requires).
Yes, mathematics-denying exists. I was surprised too.
I really don't see how this is news for nerds. I don't like coming to /. to get propaganda.
Yes, well, at least they can spell "reinforced". Last I checked, people that watch Fox News weren't having their preconceptions policed repeatedly, as you indicated. If they were, then we could hardly hold them responsible for being misinformed, after all, and the headline would be much less divisive.
Why do these studies never talk about the fact that every major news outlet (including NPR) blindly takes a corporate-centered view of the world? Corporatism is one of the biggest issue of our time and not one outlet chooses to talk about it, going so far as to cut off discussions about it when it is brought up by callers on their talk shows...
Ya know, I could easily raise my blood pressure thanks to comments from anonymous cowards and my hatred towards most media outlets, but I'm going to walk away from this one. Let's stick with News for Nerds rather than News for Political Junkies.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
stop making fun of liberals
[nt]
There are certain cases where some opinions are, objectively and factually, more correct than others. If I wrote "E = 2 mc" in a physics exam and my teacher would fail me, it would be stupid from me to shout "You shouldn't just fail people who disagree with your opinion!". This is exactly like that: We have an article about studies that have objectively shown that viewers of a certain news agency are less informed than the population as a whole. You can't counter that by screaming "Our opinions are as correct as yours!" because that's simply not true. Now, if you think that the studies themselves are flawed and have a logical reason to think so, you could just state that. Instead you chose the idiot way, created a silly strawman and some ridiculous exagerrations. *sigh*
I don't know any reasonable people who consider Fox News a valid source of information. Everybody I know will flip the channel with an expression of disgust right away.
So my feeling is that only dumb or uninformed people watch Fox News anyway.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
All this talk about bias to the left or right makes me ask the more important question of where "zero" is and if everyone can agree upon where that is. I find this side-taking to be counter-productive and keeps people from thinking for themselves. (Pretty sure that is part of the aim here) Whatever the position, anyone who thinks differently is perceived to be "on the other size of zero" which pretty much makes everyone the opposition.
I'm pretty sick of the whole idea that has compromised and and all news -- even unbiased news. Hell, it can even be argued that Wikileaks is "biased" not in its reporting (it doesn't really do any) but in what it "chooses to release, how and when."
The news must be destroyed in its current form.
These questions do not indicate level of knowledge. They are questions that generally indicate you political leanings. How does a questions like
72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit -- what is the right answer this question ? How would belief that it is true makes you more informed?
This is a rather strange survey. It didn't ask what people believed or knew to be true, it asked if they knew that "most experts have concluded X".
It isn't clear if they ever defined "most" or consistently defined the "experts". It doesn't admit the possibility of additional information now available after "most experts concluded X" which might legitimately modify people's answers.
It also isn't clear that the survey ensured people answered the survey in the intended way. That is, people might disagree with the conclusions of "most experts". What if they were informed on what "most experts" concluded but disagreed -- and answered "wrong" because of that?
While the survey may be perfectly accurate (and I may like the results) it really isn't clear that the results are particularly accurate. Too much other, rather important factors are simply not taken into account here.
...Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church on Sunday.
the original, more-closely-guarded-than-military-secrets BC
Could you provide me with some credible citation demonstrating that such a birth certificate exists, and that Obama is blocking its release? I usually find the [citation needed] crowd annoying, but this is a case where Google has given me nothing more than a bunch of outdated allegations and claims from 2008 that we're 'just days away from cracking the secret of Obama's Kenyan birth'.
Normally I wouldn't feed the trolls, but for some reason the mods saw fit to mod your post +4 Informative. I'd like to know what they know.
If there is an English major out there can you tell us if it is even possible for an individual to become "less informed" by through the act of being informed? Mis-informed I understand, but Less Informed?
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
A survey of Fox News viewers shows that correlation equals causation.
Disclosure: I am not an American and I do not watch FOX News.
But seriously, this is nothing but a troll thread, and it does not belong on Slashdot.
Studies have shown for decades that television news viewing, generally:
1) Produces voters whose preference for particular candidates is less-connected to any articulable reason,
2) Produces people that are less-informed about current events than those who watch less television.
Television drives the public agenda, and does so by suppressing rather than informing reasoned views of current events. That's pretty much been the result of the studies of media consumption, knowledge of current events, and political preferences and behavior since at least the mid-to-late 1970s.
Fox News is perhaps the purest example of a media outlet built from the ground up to exploit these facts, which were well-established by the time Fox was founded, but the problem is much broader than Fox News.
Let's see everyone's financial aid application, I'm sure we'll learn a lot from that.
Also, the word is "renounced," as in gave up, not "denounced," as in spoke disapprovingly of.
You may not be a birther, but your logic is about as faulty as a birther's.
To renounce one's citizenship, one must:
1. appear in person before a U.S. consular or diplomatic officer,
2. in a foreign country (normally at a U.S. Embassy or Consulate); and
3. sign an oath of renunciation
And minor children can't have their citizenship renounced by their parents.
http://travel.state.gov/law/citizenship/citizenship_776.html
So no, Obama didn't renounce his citizenship, even if he put down Indonesia on his college aid forms since a) He was doing this for a college and not before a US consular or diplomatic officer, b) he wasn't in a foreign country (he was in the US), and c) a college aid form is NOT an oath of renunciation.
Also, regarding the claim he gamed the system for his own ends, you started off your comment saying that he spent millions of dollars sealing his college records. So you essentially admit that you have NO PROOF that he actually put Indonesian down as his citizenship in his college aid forms. All you cite is "There is some though (sic)", which is nothing but speculation.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Two comments: 1. It seems, based on the number of comments, that most readers here automatically discount studies funded by Microsoft, but accept a study by a liberal organization without question. There are a couple of words for that and they are hypocrisy and naivete. 2. The news women on Fox are babes.
...you decided that anyone who questions the official story is "uninformed".
Sort of reminds me of the Pro-Wrestling controversy, with the latte-drinking intellectual Liberals claiming it was fake and the down-to-earth beer drinking Conservatives claiming it was real.
Speaking of a reality check:
Think that this study will be used to push for forcible shutting down of this opposition network, Chavez-style...
Since the United States doesn't have a Left Wing you don't have to worry about Socialists shutting anything down. It's all Right-wing politics in America; it's just two different political parties riding the same beast of fear, ignorance and patriotism.
As a well-informed conservative that pays too much attention to local and global politics I find this entire article insulting. You'll find idiots on both sides of the fence but I'd prefer to drink with a conservative idiot over a liberal one. This probably correlates to my overwhelming desire to choke them out and hide the body to prevent breeding when discussing facts with liberals. From my experience, liberals are almost always hopelessly uninformed and purely emotional. I've been visiting Slashdot for over 15 years now and I'll repeat that I feel politics have no useful place here. Can anyone recommend other geek news outlets that avoid politics?
ppl on /. think FOX is news?
From a link in the article:
On the other hand those who voted Democratic were more likely to incorrectly believe that: it was proven to be true that the US Chamber of Commerce was spending large amounts of foreign money to support Republican candidates (voted Democratic 57%, voted Republican 9%); Obama has not increased the level of troops in Afghanistan (51% to 39%); and Democratic legislators did not mostly vote in favor of TARP (56% to 14%).
So where did Dems get their false beliefs? Oh wait, here it is:
Daily consumers of MSNBC and public broadcasting (NPR and PBS) were higher (34 points and 25 points respectively) in believing that it was proven that the US Chamber of Commerce was spending money raised from foreign sources to support Republican candidates. Daily watchers of network TV news broadcasts were 12 points higher in believing that TARP was signed into law by President Obama, and 11 points higher in believing that most Republicans oppose TARP.
Gee it's like if you want to believe something, you will seek out info that reinforces that, and filter out info that doesn't...did anyone not know this?
"shutting down of this opposition network": So you admit that Fox is the voice of the political opposition? Which would mean that it's an arm of the GOP. I also wonder where you got the idea that anyone on the Left is calling for Fox to be shut down. The only place I've ever heard anyone make that argument is on Fox itself.
But let's not forget a few Fox facts: It's owned in majority by two people: Rupert Murdoch, an Australian who took US citizenship only in order to bypass media ownership regulations (per his own admission), and His Excellency, Prince al-Walid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who has known financial ties to Al Qaeda... Very American Channel.
do you think this story will make fox news?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...having already made up their minds and not wishing to be confused with the facts, they go there to have their preconceptions re-enforced.
This is true, and the exact same thing these "surveyors" were doing.
On a side note, how is the title of this slashdot summary any better than what Fox News does?
This study was performed by World Public Opinion who is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation among many other organizations.
Rockefeller has called for the shut down of Fox News in Congress. Statistics are once again a misinforming representation of the world.
Conservative idiots tend to get their information from Fox News and talk radio. Conservative by nature they resist change and still don't have internet access. Majority of conservative idiots live in the boonies where there is no internet available. Satellite is everywhere so they get that. As for radio, if you've ever driven through the boonies then you know what I mean - there are only two types of radio channels: country music and religion.
That said, liberal idiots quickly adapt to change so we all get our news from online news sources such as Slashdot, which posts articles from The Guardian, Solon.com and other "fair-and-balanced" news sources. As far as idiots go, the "show me the birth certificate" crowd is just as whacked as the "911 was an inside job" crowd.
because this is political... and arguing politics online is like beating your head off a wall you get a headache and the wall is still standing at the end...
91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs -- Since the stimulus bill was passed where is our unemployment rate compared to just before the stimulus bill was passed? Is it "stupid" to assume that these are related, maybe but at the same time the stimulus has not Produced jobs. Poor Question, maybe had the question been, has the Stimulus Plan slowed the increase in unemployment.
72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit -- How can they not believe that a bill that adds 1.1 Trillion Dollars to the Federal Budget is not going to increase the Federal deficit.
72 percent believe the economy is getting worse -- Alright this I don't agree with but we are at the precipice and it could go either way. At the moment we are treading water at best.
60 percent believe climate change is not occurring -- Again poor question, Climate change is occuring, the question here is preying on the thoughts of the individual, there are those who would immediately take this question as meaning, are humans the primary cause of global climate change... Obviously the climate is changing, hell yesterday it was snowing, today it's not... Climate changed... Last year it snowed tons this year looks like it's going to again, two years ago it was a mild winter, Climate changed... The sun goes through cycles, so does the sea currents. Climates have changed for eons((or merely a few millenia depending on your look at the whole creation thing)).
49 percent believe income taxes have gone up -- Whu... OK that's the first one that I have seen that could possibly be misinformation but was this from Fox, again as stated by someone else poor studies give poor results, no control group, means you don't know if this 49% is just a normal number of if it is inflated due to the news station they pay attention to. Taxes haven't gone up... yet... could they, absolutely if the previous administrations tax cuts are allowed to wholly expire then they absolutely will
63 percent believe the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts -- I didn't read the bill but it wouldn't surprise me with an educated guess that it included some tax cuts somewhere... it did however include a tax rebate.
56 percent believe Obama initiated the GM/Chrysler bailout -- I don't remember when the bailout was proposed but I didn't support it either way
38 percent believe that most Republicans opposed TARP -- Pfft riiiight... no they didn't and that was a problem
63 percent believe Obama was not born in the U.S. (or that it is unclear) -- There are alot of people regardless of what news channel that they listen to that don't think he sufficiently answered this question. Just because people just want him to pull out an actual BC doesn't mean they are misinformed.
And don't send me links to the COLB that hawaii apparently released. No one has ever shown it... If he was smart though during the upcoming silly season he would pull out of his records a copy of his actual BC and laugh about it... It's not like its that big of a deal and considering that it is a requirement outlined in the constitution of these great united states that he be a natural born citizen means that he should have been required to provide actual proof along with his intent to run for president papers as well.
Sorry. I got the title of bin Talal wrong: It's His Royal Highness. Also, he's one of the prime financiers behind the Park 51 Islamic Center (or as Fox calls it, the Ground Zero mosque). You get that? The second largest shareholder in Fox News (and News Corp) is behind the Ground Zero Mosque!!!! Did you hear that reported on Fox?
At the very same time as Fox was trashing the Park 51 project, Murdoch was busy kissing bin Talal's ass trying to siphon more money out of him. funny...
I'm not saying that bin Talal is himself an al Qaeda member, just that he funnelled money to it via front "Islamic Charities" to buy protection, just like the vast majority of the Saudi Royal Family does. But he does own the second largest share of News Corp, so it might be a good idea to find out where his real interests lie. They certainly don't lie with making sure the American People are Free and Proud.
If only I had a blackboard.....
I'd like to know what they know.
What they know is that, regardless of what it means regarding his citizenship, you're not allowed to see his birth certificate. That's what they know. Doesn't mean he isn't a citizen, just that that's one document that will never be availalble for review. Which is funny, considering how many on the left applaud the whole Wikileaks sensibility, but support Obama's no-you-may-not-see-it position on that one detail.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
When was the last time Nozick had anything printed of his besides his Anarchy, State and Utopia? Do you even know who Nozick is, or do you get your libertarian views secondhand? Because that is what this survey is indicting you for, a lack of engaging with the source material, of understanding the nature of what is going on, not from any particular ideological viewpoint but understanding that is based on the bare facts. Foxnews gets the facts wrong, over and over again, Reason, The National Review and other libertarian and conservative news organizations don't have this problem, only Fox, that is what this study is getting at, comprehende?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Seriously, click through and read the actual article. Half or more of the things that FNC viewers are stupid for believing are in fact true. Drill even deeper (the linked article itself links to other articles on older studies), which show the same sort of pattern of identifying subjects (in once case Iraq war supporters rather than FNC viewers) as being misinformed for believing things that are in fact true.
I call B.S! Don't go away mad! Just go away! Worthless post.
Survey-makers, your groupthink is plusgood! Having already decided that Fox News is a terrible thing (and that that's why people watch it more than rival networks), you made the double error of asking rigged questions and then inferring a cause-and-effect relationship. Good job at reinforcing your own beliefs.
Actually it was the poorly phrased Slashdot headline that made that claim, based loosely on the story being covered at some site called Alternet. The original study, amazingly, had no such "watching fox makes you stupid" conclusion.
But nevermind that, you just keep on rationalizing your own doubleplus groupwhatever bullshit you idiot.
Good observation.
And here's what I observed: World Public Opinion is sponsored by the Liberal-leaning, socialist-loving University of Maryland (the state where 70% of the government is Democrat)(and 90% of professors are too). So the survey bashing Libertarian-leaning FOX viewers is as unsurprising as a Microsoft-funded survey showing Google Chrome is insecure. BOTH surveys are meaningless bullshit, not worth the paper they are printed on.
Commodore64_love's posts are 70% libertarian and 90% conservative. He is biased so you don't need listen to anything he says, even if it is true. His posts are meaningless bullshit, not worth the electrons they are displayed with.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
http://www.youtube.com/user/LiberalViewer#p/c/A3BD2524FE99BD4D
(perhaps you've seen the original, more-closely-guarded-than-military-secrets BC rather than the summary?)
While I didn't personally see the telescope Galileo used to look at the planets, or hear it from his mouth that planets circle the sun, I still believe he did these things. Why? Multiple, reputable sources. Just as they've shown videos of Obama's birth certificate on various television networks, etc. I haven't seen it in person, but people who identify documents and forgeries say it's real. Nothing I can do will refute their assertions due to my lack of skill in that area, nor do I think it is necessary.
Of course, you may continue to believe that the entire government and election officials (Republican and Democrat alike) were part of some secret conspiracy to get Obama elected for some unknown reason inherently linked to the fact that he's not an American citizen. If it isn't linked to the fact he isn't an American citizen, the great conspirators could have found someone else from the 300M population of the US who would be a better, less controversial agent. But I try to keep my paranoia in the realm of the plausible.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
I suspect this is a problem for all persons regardless of political persuasion.
Anyone know if there's a good study that looks into how conservatives, liberals, etc. differ in their openness to changing their belief about non-metaphysical matters when presented with contradictory evidence?
Actually, the source article's summary doesn't match the source article very well either. First of all, it says that Fox viewers *are* less informed, not that Fox *makes* them less informed. It could be that less educated viewers go to Fox in the first place, and in fact this is pretty likely considering the image Fox cultivates. Second, it says that "CNN and the broadcast network news operations fared only slightly better in many cases". It's not really specifically about Fox.
Finally, some of the questions seem a bit odd. It is of course literally true that TARP and the GM bailout began under Bush, but it's also true that Obama heavily lent his support to both of those and was the president or president-elect during most of the time period covered by them; TARP was just a month before the election and the bailout a month *after*. Pointing out that Bush was president at the time is barely better than a Trivial Pursuit question, not a factual error on the same order of believing that Bush caused 9/11. Likewise, yes, the stimulus contained tax cuts, but the tax cuts are a tiny part of it; mistakenly believing it didn't contain any, when it in fact just didn't contain any that matter, is an error, but hardly the kind of error we really ought to care about.
The one where Beck claims to be one so he can sucked people into thinking he has economic, political and theological answers to all their problems, when in reality he doesn't understand the concepts involved between between the Rawlsian 'difference principle' and Nozick's 'entitlement theory'.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Well, I'm a Liberal-leaning, Socialist-lovin' UMCP grad.
Anyone want to be counterpoint?
Their methodology is totally bunk. You can't count the number of think-tank references in media, and then compare them to the average "liberalness" index of a congressman during the "republican revolution" and get meaningful data. This is complete fiction. Of course, I didn't need to read their methodology to do that - any study that labels Drudge as "centrist" is seriously flawed.
That's right. Republicans. 50-50 with Cheney breaking the tie.
The Tides Foundation contributes to the World Policy Organization. And who funds the Tides Foundation? Spooky-dude himself, George Soros. Yet another liberal-skewed 'poll' conducted by a liberal, internationalist think tank, paraphrased by some idiot who gets his news off of Alternet of all places. Somehow 'less-informed' became 'stupid'. Nope, not biased at all. Really, people, isn't there some tech news out there in the world someplace that would at least be relevant AND interesting?
Nothing to see here but us trolls...move along...
Who is the misinformed one here?
The birth certificate - not a reformatted reprinted redacted copy - has not been shown. really.
There are more than one category of citizen, not all of which are eligible to be President. really.
While there is little or no question that he is a citizen of the usa, there remains the question of whether he is in the category of eligible-to-be-President citizens. really.
Thus, it is not a legitimate conclusion to slam 63 percent of Fox viewers who believe Obama was not born in the US (or that it is unclear) as "misinformed" - fact is, the proof has not been shown. The "misinformed" ones are, in fact, the ones who do not comprehend the legal difference and interactions between country of birth vs. country of citizenship - you being one.
This "survey" has interesting timing, driven by hardcore leftists (see prior posts listing those behind this "survey") and coming out at the same time other hardcore leftists are pushing a variety of "new, improved, unbiased" approaches to manipulating social politics - when they are, upon easy analysis, highly biased & opinionated and simply declaring themselves unbiased and factual.
Lacking proof of legal and/or scientific form, one has only opinion.
Your stance, and that of the self-righteous group behind the "survey", is opinion.
Just because it is your opinion does not make it fact.
really.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Correllation does not equal causation. I believe Fox simply exists to serve up news from the angle preferred by those who believe conspiracy theories (e.g., Obama being foreign-born) and who, while interested in military victory, are uninterested in details surrounding the war (especially things uncovered after the fact).
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
What astonishes me is that so few people even bother to "click through" to find the original source of this claim, even though it's so terribly easy to do so on the web (due to hyperlinks).
This slashdot story is a "summary of a summary" and is several degrees removed from the original source.
The news story upon which this is based, was taken from a lefty news source (alter.net), and is hysterically distorted. The original poll does not claim that "Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources." Nor does the original poll claim that Fox news causes viewers to become misinformed. Quite the opposite, the original poll claims that Fox news viewers are less informed about some issues, whereas viewers of lefty news sources are less informed about other issues, and that "...this suggests that misinformation cannot simply be attributed to news sources, but are part of the larger information environment that includes statements by candidates, political ads and so on."
The alter.net story has drastically distorted the original poll. The story picked and chose specific issues about which fox viewers were less informed, while ignoring (and failing to re-print!) other issues about which they were better informed. Then the story then concluded (contrary to the poll's specific language) that Fox viewers were "less informed".
What astonishes me, is that lefty commentors here on slashdot appear to have read a drastically distorted and incorrect news story, then swallowed it whole, without any criticism or research, all the while believing that they are open minded, critical, and better-informed than the stupid people who watch Fox.
It's especially ironic that the alter.net article was complaining about bias in the news on the conservative side, when the article itself was a particularly striking example of not just bias but outright flagrant distortion in the news from the left.
ppl on /. think CNN, MSNBC, BBC, etc. are news?
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Whether or not the US has gained or lost jobs over a given period of time is very much measurable. You have to be incredibly partisan to claim otherwise, which is exactly what we expect from anyone making the "both sides are just as bad" false equivalence claim. Even if the people doing this study were "just as bad", that would not prove that the evidence of FOX's bias is itself biased.
So we get a false claim (that this study is exactly as bad as FOX News, which is demonstrably not the case), and the attempt to use a tu quoque logical fallacy to absolve FOX News of bias (or at least mitigate the claims of bias). As usual with the false equivalence claim, we get a two for one deal!
...and it doesn't fit. Send your opinion back, it doesn't suit you. Shows your bias _way_ too much.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I think this whole situation could easily be solved by changing the name Fox News into Fox Mews. I thinks the meanings of that word(*) quite nicely covers the content:
*
mew 1: intr.v.- cry like a cat; "the cat meowed".
mew 2: n.- A cage for hawks.
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
This was the identification one of you /.ers made in a relevant discussion about them. i think that tells all that there is to tell about them.
Read radical news here
As much as I dislike Fox News, the immediate reaction of "Of course this just reinforces my belief that fox watchers are idiots blah blah" is just as deplorable.
* 91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs
What does this question even mean? It could mean was the stimulus legislation directly responsible for lost jobs or it could mean were jobs lost despite the stimulus legislation. The latter I believe is true. It would have to be for unemployment to remain at close to 10% and for jobless claims to rise before, during, and after the stimulus.
* 72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit
Won't it? They say it won't but then again they said the Big Dig would only cost a fraction of what it actually did, so there estimates can not be 100% relied upon. We won't know until afterwards who was right and who was wrong. This isn't a verifiable fact yet because it hasn't happened.
* 72 percent believe the economy is getting worse
First off, define "The Economy". Second define "Getter better" and "getting worse". You can't. The economy is amorphous entity conjured up as both the cause of great pain and the bringer endless happiness. People only really understand their own personal economies, their own personal finances and for most of them they are worse off now then they were before and it doesn't look like its getting any better.
* 60 percent believe climate change is not occurring
And what percentage of expert scientists believe this as well? This is not a concluded fact, it is a controversial issue that has experts on both sides contradicting each other. Both sides firmly believe they are right, and since there is lots of money to be had on either side of the issue (the question is who gets it) ulterior motives are highly suspected as they should be.
* 49 percent believe income taxes have gone up
State or Federal? In Massachusetts income taxes have gone up. For who? people making more or less than $250,000? Taxes are such a complex web of crap that even full-time accountants and compliance officers probably don't know for sure one way or the other whether this is true. One example: Did taxes go up? No, but deductions went down.
* 63 percent believe the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts
Probably because the tax cuts included were invisible to most people. Sure they got what $500 evenly divided across all paychecks for the year. Who would have noticed this or even spent a whole lot of time talking about it?
* 56 percent believe Obama initiated the GM/Chrysler bailout
Well he did call for the firing of the CEO and get a lot of face-time and credit for sealing the deal. Didn't GM and Chrysler initiate it though?
* 38 percent believe that most Republicans opposed TARP
Define "Most Republicans". The elected ones, the members of the party, or all who registered as Republicans? Besides that happened years ago, with all the fighting back and forth who can remember that? Not most people. Besides I doubt any news outlet clearly said most Party-X agree, most Party-Y disagree.
* 63 percent believe Obama was not born in the U.S. (or that it is unclear)
When was this made clear? I must of missed it. He has vehemently fought any attempt to make his birth certificate available to the public or his school transcripts for that matter. He has spent millions of dollars suppressing this. Why? What does he have to hide? If it's not that he wasn't born in the US then what is it? What would be worth all the money, time and aggravation? This is what makes it unclear to people who don't believe everything they hear. And as far as history goes, I think it is unprecedented. For a US President
Ok, I'll admit that I thought he was born on USA soil in Indonesia. To me, that is just as good as being born in Kansas City, KS (not MS). You can't get any more natural born that that to me. The fact that he was born in Hawaii only means there is ZERO question to me. He is our President just like the last guy was and all the ones previously. They all deserve our respect and our thanks - at least for the Office, if not the man. This was not an issue in my 2008 Presidential decision.
I do not watch any TV news shows unless they interrupt my normal viewing (which pisses me off), but I have watched Fox the most in the last 10 years - their chicks are hotter. ;) The blond from MN is extremely right wing, however, like she attended training at some Catholic Church for 15 yrs. I just turn down the sound. The CNBC morning chicks are hotter, however.
Politics is not interesting to me, unless it directly impacts or screws with a right to be left alone. Right now, my goal is to convince my representative to vote against anything that spends more money. Smaller government is a better government to me. I prefer deadlock - it means they aren't screwing things up or spending MY money. If that makes me ignorant, fine. I vote in every election - EVERY ONE OF THEM.
Whats the matter boys, are your back orifices still hurting from November?
Are you that desperate in your search for meaning your now completely out of step with reality?
Or have you just not removed the anal plugs from said orifices yet you cant think straight?
Whatever your problem, its no secret you are the problem you Berkely loving slashtard tools!
WorldPublicOpinion.org is managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the U of Maryland. PIPA has been funded by the Tides Foundation, which is funded by George Soros.
It only took three degrees that time.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The real question is whether people who watch Fox News are worse off than people who consume no news whatever!
But really - isn't it just as likely that people with a poorer ability or lack of interest in retaining news-related facts are more likely to watch Fox as it is that Fox is somehow actively ill-informing otherwise perfectly normal people?
Since correlation REALLY isn't causation, we have to take this with a pinch of salt.
Calling someone uninformed or stupid no longer works as a debating point because the people you are trying to denigrate are neither. The left's control over media is falling apart and they will try anything no matter how weak and erratic to try to silence people who disagree. Just accept it, socialism was pwnd last election and will continue to be pwnd because it has failed mankind in every case.
It's a question of freedom vs. security. Although I am not a Republican, I see them as slightly less evil than Democrats because they want to steal slightly less from me. The Democrats wish to impose more social programs at a greater cost, which means that they want to steal more of the money than I earn. I realize that Republicans want to impose more personal restrictions on me, so it's a close race. In a perfect country, there would be no income taxes and everyone would have to provide for themselves. I shouldn't owe anyone any piece of what I earn. Government would exist solely so that no one could harm or defraud me without repercussions. No job guarantees, no "free" health care, no free education, etc...
Your claim that Obama is our best President in a long time is laughable, although you don't live here, so your complete ignorance is somewhat understandable. With the help of Congress he has increased our deficit much higher than Bush managed to for programs that the majority of Americans do not want. His stated intention is to raise taxes for the purpose of fairness, not for the sake of the nation's taxpayers or economy. "Best" is certainly a subjective term, but Obama doesn't even come close on any scale unless the top of that scale is bankrupting a nation.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
I'd say that has poured gasoline on the fire. But as an American, I think the roots of the problem is a badly decentralized education system. I don't know how it is in Germany, but in the US public schools are largely controlled and funded at the local level - which means erratic standards. Wealthy areas get far better "public" schools than poor ones - and the poor ones are further susceptible specifically to poor history and don't want to challenge local sacred cows.
So the Alamo is taught as horrible unwanted aggression by Mexicans, after Texans had just happened to take a bunch of land that God really meant for them. And the Civil War's "State's Rights" aspects are exaggerated, and fighting against slavery is less connected to it. And the Spanish-American war, the US support of Battista in Cuba that led to Castro, the CIA overthrow of Iran's elected government that led to the Shah, etc. etc. is just not gone into.
So people in some areas, specifically the American South, grow up with an ideologically comfortable view of history and thus reality which is completely skewed, and ripe for manipulation by protecting that comfortable view from reality.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
The liberal left of America is only a fashion set by celebrities (who didn't earn their money; hence the guilty conscious and feeling that none one else earned their money either) and college professors (who largely come from socialist countries now days; b/c they're willing to work their ass of for nothing just to get the hell out of their socialist country which has no opportunities). The leftist elites have fooled many americans into thinking that agreeing with them = being intelligent (which only attracts those who aren't intelligent).
For MSNBC to have a real left wing Bias, we'd first to have a real left wing in the United States... Suffice it to say, I'm still waiting to see a communist talking head on the news.
Make no mistake... The United States has a Right Wing party and a Centrist Party. True left wingers are a fringe group in these parts.
At least they have Family Guy and American Dad.
Is that news to you? It;s FOX!
If Paul Krugman is your ideal of an economist, then tax cuts certainly will violate "nearly every proven economic principle". Your statement is as biased as this survey.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
Hey, don't forget NYTimes and Washington Post. They are no less corrupt.
Thank you. Would mod up if I could.
Hawaii's freakin' head of the Department of Health has verified Obama's birth certificate exists. AND Hawaiian state law forbids the release of this certificate to anyone BUT the person or their parents.
http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/has_obamas_birth_certificate_been_disclosed.html
So even if Obama felt the need to release his original to others i.e. the press, it seems unlikely that he legally CAN. I believe the only specific exceptions in Hawaii are for court cases revolving around whether persons are entitled to reparations for land taken from the original Hawaiians.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
It was an obvious troll; no reply was necessary.
The errors in your grammar are not those of a native German speaker. Did you emigrate from America?
Help I'm a rock.
I started watching MSNBC back when I first started following politics, about 10 years ago. Back then, it was a CNN clone (or what CNN was before they went infotainment). Straight reporting, single host format. Not much discernible bias. They had Phil Donahue's talk show who was quite left-leaning and the only guy on the news actually speaking out against the Iraq invasion. And, I don't mean the post-rationalizers like Chris Matthews, who by the way reveled in his Right-Centrism before Olbermann made being on the Left cool. Well, MSNBC didn't want to be seen as the anti-war channel since we all know that people who object to war are homosexual, Communist, cowards. So, they fired Phil Donahue who by then had their highest rated show.
They then went out and hired a bunch of conservatives to, as Phil Griffin said it, make themselves "Fox news lite." They brought on Alan Keyes, Tucker Carlson, Joe Scarborough, Mike Smirkonich [sic], Pat Buchanan, John Gibson, Michael "Weiner" Savage (yes, that one), et. al. and all the right-leaning mouth pieces they could find. They did their damnedest to be another Righty channel, but in our media climate if you're not Fox or Limbaugh, you're a part of the liberal media conspiracy. So, nothing MSNBC did could give them Fox News' street cred with the Conservative base. Coincidentally, Keith Olbermann was brought on and made his name being one of the few to publicly speak out on the Iraq war (this was at a time when people were being fired or worse for being anti-war mind you). On top of that, the Righties that MSNBC brought on turned out to be abysmal failures. Either they sucked, just didn't have the intellectual chops for political debate, or couldn't help themselves from making offensive comments (Savage's comments about homosexuals and Gibson's "Black people should be happy for slavery since it got them out of Africa" segment). So, MSNBC found new success for what they *thought* was leaning to the Left. When, in actuality it was because they hosted people willing to speak truth to power whatever end of the spectrum.
But, the story doesn't have a happy ending. Phil Griffin is a ratings chaser. So, if a little left in the news got him ratings, well naturally a LOT of left would turn MSNBC into a juggernaut. He put Keith Olbermann in some kind of creative director talent finding role. This immediately turned KO into an arrogant, self-important douchbag. Check out these clips from the 2008 DNC shortly after. Chris Matthews, who'd been the icon of the network and who obediently shut up about the contradictions of the case for the Iraq war and Bush elections, now felt that he'd surrendered his credibility and crown to KO and became even more of a loud, interrupting jerk. They went out and hired more liberals with more of a party- than ideological-loyalty and went for broke.
I used to watch/listen to MSNBC for 4-5 hours a day after work. Now, it's intolerable partisan drivel. KO is infatuated with his own voice and polishing his perceived mantle place next to Edward R. Murrow. Chris Matthews is basically using the show and his guests to spout his own views, sometimes completely disregarding the people he's supposed to be interviewing. Ed Schulz, while I admire his pro-labor efforts, just isn't smart and knowledgeable enough to have a prime time political show. Rachel Maddow is obsessed with her advocacy, even if it's some piss-ant church in Africa calling for murdering gays. I can't stand their prime time lineup anymore. Worst, they're not really doing what made them successful in the first place; challenging those in power regardless of party.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
However, most of the things that they use as examples of Fox News viewers being stupid are opinions, not facts. The very first one they list is the large number of Fox News viewers who think that the stimulus legislation lost jobs. Well, the U.S. economy has lost quite a few jobs since the stimulus legislation was passed, so it is perfectly legitimate to blame the stimulus legislation.
Ha ha ha!
So a guy named George kicks you in the nuts and throws you out of a plane and fall at 60 miles an hour for a while.
You recover, and open the parachute, which fortunately you had on.
Despite the parachute, you continue to fall to a lower altitude!! ZOMG!
with the parachute you survive but you skin your knee as you land!
is it perfectly legitimate to BLAME your PARACHUTE for your fall? Or did it save you?
i will agree without a valid birth certificate and obama not showing it does look funny, if obama was truely born in the usa and has a valid birth cert to prove it then he should show it because it would be a non-issue...
:p
fox leans too far to the right and obama leans way too far to the left and they cancel each other out, so maybe it is "fair & balanced"
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
We may as well do a study to see if people who lack "critical thinking skills" wind up believing things that are utter bollocks and stock large amounts of snake oil. The source doesn't matter. Snake oil has been for sale for years. Just because Fox is selling it in bulk, doesn't mean you can't get it in quantity from any of the 24/7 "news" networks. Remember how many people thought Saddam Hussein was connected to the Twin Towers attack? That belief was across the board.
Snake oil salesmen are slick because they don't have a product worth buying. Confirmation bias is a con man's best friend. No one is immune. Let's just remember that, and let's stop pointing out motes in others' eyes when we've got a big ol' log in ours.
--
Toro
(Who sometimes watches Fox "News" for the entertainment value, especially Beck.)
Funny, that's not the belief I see in my head. Thanks for telling me what I'm thinking is not what I'm thinking I'm thinking. Of course, you who knows nothing of me save one post knows more about me than I do.
You've blown right past the content of my post, having already decided what I've said therein even though it's not what I said.
Where? Show it. Don't tell me it was shown. SHOW IT.
And here we are, going around in circles again. My side saying "where's the proof?", your side saying "it was shown", repeated ad infinitum. There is no proof. No proof was shown. What has been shown isn't proof, it's claims proof exists. We'll shut up when it's shown; we're asking because it wasn't.
Can you articulate what the legal difference between the two categories of "citizen" in question are? No, you just spout your "shut up, idiot" line, deriding those who are asking for nothing more than a straight copy of one piece of paper - which you have not seen.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
The questions, interpretations, etc are unclear.
Take for example WMDs in Iraq.
1) Numerous elements for WMD development was in deed found. However, as most of it was dual use (remember the difference between a WMD and a Newscaster's wrinkle free face is merely dilution). A number of depots were found guarded by the military, in camouflaged bunkers containing stockpiles of 50 gallon drums filled with pesticides. Supposedly for their booming agricultural industry. Don't ask why the military would have them instead of the farmers. Could it be because with a bit of glass tubing you could concentrate the nerve toxins to weapon grade levels.
Hmmm...
This doesn't even get into the evidence that pointed to a large amount of equipment being moved out via Syria. In fact, even Wikileaks included info on this topic.
As for President Obama's birth. He should just put out a photograph of the original. Settle it for good. His not doing so actually kindles the issue.
-------
Frankly, I find liberal progressives far less informed about most issues. Most conservatives as well. Seems to me that the only group that tends to be informed are the Libertarians.
The flaw in your logic is comparing Germany to the US Republic when you should compare it to a single US State. You obviously do not understand that the United States is not a Democracy. The United States is a Republic that is comprised of 50 Democracies. Article X of our Constitution states that any powers not explicitly conferred to the Republic are reserved to the States. That would include the power to compel someone to buy insurance.
Germany and Massachusetts both have universal healthcare. What's the difference? You have argued that Massachusetts should subsidize the healthcare of Wyoming... would you also agree that Germany should subsidize the healthcare of Bulgaria? How did you feel about bailing out the Greeks retirement? Universal healthcare in Europe is a lie... your system is state based in exactly the same way as the US system. So please, worry about your own continent and stop telling us how to run ours.
Because we all know that Slashdot summaries and especially titles are inaccurate and misleading (somewhere in the range of "mild bias" to "omg wtf it says the exact opposite"). In fact, one of the first +5 Informative posts is always a correction from someone who actually RTFA'd.
Those poor Fox News victims cannot find enlightenment through moderation like we can.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
I think its not as simple as a question of freedom vs. security. First of all, there have to be taxes. Individuals don't build roads between cities, build aircraft carriers, put out fires in the neighbourhood or watch for law and order. There are some things only the state can do.
The real question is how much the state should do and how the state should spend taxes.
As I see it, the Republican Party has a track record of spending money in ways that will benifit their buddies in corprorations (wars- defense industry, Halliburton, oil contracts, ...). So during a Republican administration taxes will mostly be funelled into corporations.
Democrats prefer to spend taxes on welfare, social programs and infrastructure, which means that the taxes benefit the people on the street and flow back to the tax payers.
In addition, Republicans like to make big deficits in order to further weaken the state and thereby empower corporations. Democrats try to keep deficits down so that a strong state can keep corporations in check.
I think by now we should all know how important it is to keep corporations in check. And I think that any sane person would prefer to have his taxes be invested back into the populace instead of expensive contracts for defense, logistics, and energy industries
But then in the U.S. you have your privately owned News Corporations that belong to the very same rich folks. And they are able to convince 50% of the american public that Democrats are evil socialists and that buying guns is the way to freedom.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that I see the greatest long-term threat to the U.S. not in terrorism and some guy sitting in the mountains of Afghanistan, but inside the very heart of the U.S. news networks that work so hard and dilligently to keep the american public ignorant and stupid.
Now there's an Oxymoron. One cannot ignore the ratings though. But one question is currently being evaluated; and that is, "are more people getting their news content from the Internet?" I think the answer is a resounding "YES!". By deduction, that leaves only those that are agreeable to being ill-informed. The problem here is that those that watch FN are most likely those that are Fiercely Proud Ignorant types; and these folks appear to be motivated to vote their whim.
I love that it is stated as implied fact that Obama was born in the US. His birth certificate was forged by pro-Obama supporters.
besides the obvious (correlation != causation), many or most of the "facts" they claim that Fox viewers are on the wrong side of aren't "facts" that can be proven.
* 91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs
It's not a fact that it had a net gain in jobs, especially over time. There are those who argue that government spending takes away from (in taxes) and crowds out (in spending) private-sector spending , and less efficiently.
*** As with each example, I am not arguing that this is necessarily the case.
* 72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit
Why does believing that a new and expensive government program will increase the deficit mean that someone is "less informed"? The last OMB estimates, in fact, said that it would cost $1T over the next ten (IIRC) years. And that's during a period when there will be several years of payments in before the services (costs) begin.
* 72 percent believe the economy is getting worse
By some measures, it has. Practically every month you can point to numbers that point in either direction.
* 60 percent believe climate change is not occurring
One of the questions to the guy from the East Anglia Climate Research Center was (I don't have it in front of me) was whether the climate had warmed since 1995, and his answer was that statistically, it had not.
* 49 percent believe income taxes have gone up
Okay, now that's a fact for which there is an undisputable answer. People who believe that are less-informed than people who do not.
* 63 percent believe the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts
They didn't include any changes in income tax rates, which is what people could have understood that to mean. A lot of them (as I'm looking them up) are refundable tax credits, which are as much a check handed out as they are a tax cut.
* 56 percent believe Obama initiated the GM/Chrysler bailout
Okay, again that one's confirmably not true.
* 38 percent believe that most Republicans opposed TARP
Republican people? Republican voters? Republican Members of Congress?
* 63 percent believe Obama was not born in the U.S. (or that it is unclear)
AGAIN, I'm not arguing that he *wasn't*. But that someone could believe, given the controversy over his birth certificate/certificate of live birth/whatever, that it was "unclear" does not make them uninformed. "unclear" is a very subjective word.
So: Seven of the nine "facts" either aren't facts, or are subjective, or sloppily worded.
Two
Voters' misinformation included beliefs at odds with the conclusions of government agencies, generally regarded as non-partisan, consisting of professional economists and scientists.
So what are these "non-partisan" government agencies? They are the Congressional Budget Office, the Department of Commerce, and the National Academy of Sciences. The Department of Commerce is blatantly partisan, serving at the behest of President Obama. The CBO is directed in what assumptions (those assumptions being blatantly partisan) it is required to make. As a result, it's conclusions are near useless. The National Academy of Science is the only really non-biased agency.
The press release also conflates opinions of organizations with far larger groups. Because the CBO issued an opinion on the effects of stimulus spending, they say
Though the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concluded that the stimulus legislation has saved or created 2.0-5.2 million jobs, only 8% of voters thought most economists who had studied it concluded that the stimulus legislation had created or saved several million jobs. Most (68%) believed that economists estimate that it only created or saved a few jobs and 20% even believed that it resulted in job losses.
The press release does it again while discussing the CBO's conclusions about health care reform. The CBO is not and has never been "most economists". They do a similar thing with the National Academy of Science, claiming that because the NAS reached a certain conclusion then "most scientists" did as well.
The next section isn't quite so bad.
Other key points of misinformation among voters were:
* 40% of voters believed incorrectly that the TARP legislation was initiated under Barack Obama, rather than George Bush
* 31% believed it was proven true that the US Chamber of Commerce spent large amounts of money it had raised from foreign sources to support Republican candidates
* 54% believed that there were no tax cuts in the stimulus legislation
* 86% assumed their taxes had gone up (38%) or stayed the same (48%), while only 10% were aware that their taxes had gone down since 2009
* 53% thought that the bailout of GM and Chrysler occurred only under Obama, though it was initiated under Bush
Note that most of the "misinformation" is slanted towards the Democrat side. And the bailout of GM and Chrysler are fully Obama's baby. They happened far to late into the administration to place blame on a previous administration even if that administration may have started a bailout process for them. As for the tax item, it comes from this question:
Q11. Since January 2009 have your Federal income taxes gone up a lot, gone up a little, stayed the same, gone down a little, gone down a lot?
There are more years after January, 2009 than just 2009. If I expect my 2009 taxes to go down, but my income taxes beyond 2012 to go up a lot, what should my answer be? Also there was no measure for determining whether the participates were incorrect or not. If I got a raise or execute some types of financial transactions (eg, turning regular IRA into a Roth IRA), I could see my taxes go up.
In sum, this study (or at the very least, the press release for the study) appears rather pointless except as a bit of propaganda.
or perhaps your news organizations aren't as unbiased as you personally believe?
just a thought.
Meh, my impression was that Obama wanted to tax people over 250k a year (if you're not in that tax bracket you shouldn't care) and provide a universal healthcare plan, which got gutted down to insurance reform. I'd argue that Bush has done more to bankrupt the country with a war we don't need which coincided with the financial collapse (not really his fault) and that Obama is trying to triage the situation; See wikipedia for some fun stats on how that is turning out. While the Demcrats do advocate social spending, it appears they actually make an effort to reduce the debt. Obama may not be the best president, but I do think he's a significant step up from Bush. I blame the fact that he has a hard time accomplishing anything on the GOP, which has adopted the policy of opposing him for the sake of recouping clout and power lost by Bush jr.
As a non-US citizen I'm amazed at the things that Americans label as leftist. In my country, the Republicans would be right-wing, the Democrats merely right of center. The real American left would be the unelectable Green Party and Socialist party "loonies".
You might be right that I am generalizing when perhaps I should not. I am actually not familiar with the regulations of individual states.
But I am talking about a large part of the general american populace, which for some reason believes socialism to be inherently -evil-, anything barely resembling welfare to be -evil-, and giving a little more power to the state to be -evil-. This is an exaggerated, outdated and simplistic view on things that is propagated especially by Republicans and Fox News.
In the last few years I think even americans should have learned that banks and corporations, if left unchecked, will only benefit themselves at great cost to the public and therefore can be just as "evil".
I was trying to provide an example, that more power and control for the state is not necesserily a bad thing.
Because you're an idiot.
I would consider myself "European". My nationality is not German, I grew up in 3 different countries, but I have lived mostly in Germany.
I'm rubber and you're glue... what you say, sticks to you... or however that went.
Pwned, bitch.
Fox news mentioned twice by an admittedly biased organization and only in one very particular regard. Now who is the victim of misinformation?
I love when "study" comes out to announce the plainly obvious. -but i guess somebody has to prove these things
Maybe all that "independent" media that is fed to you from your government has muddled your brain, but if you love Obama so much you can have him. He will be looking for a job in two in years and will be desperately looking for something to feed his narcissistic personality disorder, feed into that and he is all yours, enjoy.
In addition, Republicans like to make big deficits in order to further weaken the state and thereby empower corporations. Democrats try to keep deficits down so that a strong state can keep corporations in check.
Just look at the last four years of Democratic control of the Congress: huge increases in our deficits. The deficits increased further when Obama took office and the Dems could virtually guarantee that their agenda was passed. I don't like either party, but the Democrats are the bigger spenders.
As far as taxes go, I never said there should be no taxes. I said no income taxes. There is a huge difference. Income taxes imply that everything I make is at the mercy of the government. I don't know how this model gained worldwide acceptance, but there's little I can do about it now except to encourage its reduction where I can.
I have zero faith in the "populace" so I do not want my taxes "invested" in them. There is no such thing because giving money away will never make it grow, as "investment" implies. Let us have all of our money and invest it as we please. If we don't have enough to survive, we're fucked, but at least we brought it on ourselves. No one should be in the position of owing anyone else because the other person fucked up. Ever.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
These include a lot more opinion than fact, due to the lack of specific information or claims.
There was a time in the US when the federal government gave money to networks so they would carry the news. That was the best period of journalism the country has ever seen.
Whats happening is the news goes after the ends of the curve.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Meh, my impression was that Obama wanted to tax people over 250k a year (if you're not in that tax bracket you shouldn't care)
Why not? People not in this tax bracket certainly aspire to be in it one day. And people making over this are the ones that supply jobs. Increasing their taxes makes jobs scarcer.
While the Demcrats do advocate social spending, it appears they actually make an effort to reduce the debt.
Um, what? Please point to one article that proves this.
Obama may not be the best president, but I do think he's a significant step up from Bush. I blame the fact that he has a hard time accomplishing anything on the GOP, which has adopted the policy of opposing him for the sake of recouping clout and power lost by Bush jr.
Last I checked, the Democrats controlled both houses and the Presidency, and have passed huge bills they they have wanted to pass. All of this has resulted in increased deficits, little of which can be blamed on Bush or Republicans. it also resulted in a large number of them being tossed out on their asses.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
In the United States we (used to) believe in the concept of individual liberty. It is this that made us stronger and more powerful than any other country in history, including Germany.
I understand that to a collectivist it can be difficult to comprehend that there are people who truly believe that they should only be responsible for themselves. Capitalism is what made our nation great. We've been moving away from that for a few decades now, and soon we will join the rest of the world in mediocrity.
You know, I've never understood why Europeans are so smug and pushy with their ideology towards Americans. I rarely hear Americans carrying on about the systems of government over there.
I recall a Pew poll from around the time of the Iraq invasion that I think asked about Saddam's involvement in 9/11 based on primary news source. NPR got 80%, CNN got 70%, and Fox News 25%.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
and my interpretation of events and predictions for the future.
I conclude they are all ill informed.
I respect your standpoint, but I believe that it is egoistical and short-sighted.
As a tax payer, you will benifit in the medium to long term from your money being invested into "the populace" through schools, welfare, education.
Education and welfare funded with your tax dollars means more innovation, less crime, higher paying jobs, new enterprises... a lot of positive feedback that is in turn reinvested and practically pays for itself in the long term. The whole society benefits.
If in turn all wealthy people hoard all their hard earned money and give up on the less fortunate, this will result in poverty, crime, social imbalance, dysfunctional families... a lot of negative feedback that is in turn "reinvested" and creates ever more social instability.
Of course, you can try to keep away from it all. Move to a better neighbourhood, build higher walls, install an alarm system, buy a gun... but it would be so much more productive to support people rather than to shut them out.
"I can't think of any examples where MSNBC hosts openly shilled, on the air, for political candidates. "
I don't remember Fox News journalists getting "thrills up their legs" on the air over political candidates. Or at least they had the good taste not to tell us about it when they did.
You forgot:
In socialist Germany, we get to bail out all the other socialist loser countries in the Union because they have chronic socialist agendas in which they vastly over-promise social services and benefits when in fact they have no way of ever actually affording them. Nothing makes people work harder than knowing that their hard earned money will go support some losers retirement in Greece right?
In socialist Germany, we get to pay ridiculous amounts of tax just like all our other socialist neighbors. Indeed finding these great socialist utopias is as easy as looking for the 40%+ numbers on a tax vs GDP chart.
Now you can queue up some videos of the French striking and rioting as their retirement age increases by a whole TWO years. Socialist shock and horror there, sheesh get real.
To answer your question - people here vote Republican because the Democrats have no function other than piling more unfunded entitlement programs on an already broke system. No matter how much you like socialist programs, they can't exist if you have no money to fund them, and there is NO money.
Let the flame war begin!
really /. really?
Vinaka Jo
And all of this while juggling the tremendous deficit and two wars that Obama inherited from his precursor, and an economic crisis sparked by just these wealthy allmighties which the taxpayer had to step in for.
First off, are you talking about the budget deficit or the national debt? If you are talking about the budget deficit, then know this. The president doesn't make the budget, he can only sign or not sign it. Congress sets the budget. Obama was a congressman before becoming president (for however short a time) and voted for the budget he inherited - so he inherited it from himself in a manner of speaking. If you are talking about the National Debt, then every President has inherited it, but only Obama doubled it in a matter of two years. with the aim of doubling it again in another 8 (I think). That's right, he doubled the debt it took this country over 200 years to accumulate in a just couple of years and plans to double it again. You wonder why we are so spiteful and disapproving? This is why. He is bankrupting this country.
In other news, the same surveyors found that 63% of people interviewed thought slashdot was worth reading.
wake up and hold your nose
Entirely valid criticism. Countries like Greece have inflated, corrupt governments that spend money like there's no tomorrow. But what I am meaning to say is that socialism isn't entirely bad and unchecked capitalism isn't entirely good. I think there has to be even balance with checks on both sides. And what is happening in the US is that there is this Fox/Republican fueled prejudice against socialism as if it were the root of all evil.
Meh, the US right-wingers are ruled by fear... fear of socialism, fear of {black|hispanic|muslim|different} people, fear of progress and change.
I actually agree with just about everything the AC GP says... most of the core values of the Republicans and Libertarians sound great in theory. But I tend to side with the socialist Democrats in practice, if only because I tend to favor intelligence over, um, projected image.
Healthcare is socialism, socialism is good, without it we'd have a pretty crappy existence without SS and medicare. A lot of it seems like corporate welfare for the pharmaceuticals, though.
My wife teaches in schools with lots of immigrants, many of them illegal. She's interviewed a few of them for her PhD. Yes, most are here for free education, to give their children a window of opportunity. They aren't getting free cars, houses, food, or healthcare, though. They work hard at multiple jobs. Without education, they join gangs and become a problem. Other than that, they're an asset. Immigration was always what made this country strong. Not being able to accommodate it is a wasted resource.
The government has blown lots of taxpayer money. Unfortunately, leave it to the terrorists to be the only ones who bothered to punish Wall Street for their excesses and failures.
I don't see what the French have to do with anything. But they're cool. Anti-French sentiment is just more xenophobia, I guess.
I'm disappointed in Obama in that so far that it's pretty much looked like GWBush's third term, as far as the economy is concerned. But at least I don't wince and cringe every time he opens his mouth and says something. I'm with the late Douglas Adams, in that the President is just there to draw attention away from who really controls the government.
As far as I know, Obama did not vote for the Iraq war and did not start the Afghanistan war, which were the first two big black holes in the budget.
Then along came the banking crisis due to unchecked, rampant capitalism that Fox and Republicans praise so much. So Obama practically had the choice between:
1. Bail out the banks, create economic stimulus package, save 10 million jobs, accumulate huge deficit, be universally hated by everybody.
or
2. Don't bail out the banks, further aggravate the crisis, dont create stimulus package, lose 10 million jobs, be universally hated by everybody.
So, well, yeah. He went for No. 1.
i mean, those fools who defend faux non-news.
fox news, while defending against a libel suit a few years ago, argued and declared to the court that they were NOT a news organization that was making news, but 'opinionated entertainment'. there was NO trace of any kind of concepts like 'fact' or 'news' or 'information' in their defense. with this, they were able to dismiss the lawsuit that a person that they have LIED blatantly about, incessantly, and libeled in that fashion, has filed against them.
after that, anyone defending such an outfit as 'news' would qualify as morons. even they themselves dont call that.
Read radical news here
I know that Obama claims to have been born on O'ahu. I also know that "birthers" either question the documentation Obama has produced, or question that the documentation provides ample proof that Obama was born in Hawai'i Nei.
I'm of the opinion that Obama was young enough when he arrived in Hawai'i that it's not his fault he was born in Africa (assuming the birthers are right).
People don't supply jobs, companies supply jobs. A business owner or CEO in the 250k bracket that has his taxes raised is not going to tell his company to hire fewer people. Why would he? The company's income is not affected in the least.
The Republicans did a very good job bringing about the budget surplus we had during the Clinton years. But they screwed up during the Bush years, and during the Obama years, they've been obstructing even good ideas that Obama has put forth. (I say Obama because I haven't heard many good ideas from the Democrats in Congress.) In particular, Bush's tax cuts and the recent extension of same under Republican pressure is unquestionably bad for the United States' budget situation.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
QFT (because I've no mod points)
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
More People KNOW that Obama was truly not born in the U.S.A. LOL. We don't, or won't acknowledge domestic chimps as intelligent life either.
The worst part about this poll is questions they consider to be absolute are not.
Was President Obama Born in the United States?
Constutionally to be elected one must be born in the US, As such the "Correct Answer" is Yes. However, A Kenyan doctor has gone on the record claiming to have delivered President Obama in Kenya. When President Obama was sued in an attempt to have him prove he was native born he was able to have the case dismissed because "No one was harmed". The president has declined to prove this, and another source has claimed different. Thus this falls more in line of an opinion. It is my opinion that the president was NOT born in the US. It would have been far easier to simply prove the people that claimed otherwise wrong then take a beating for the lingering doubt. Someone who uses legal tactics to avoid proving that they meet the basic requirements for a position usually has something to hide.
What religion is Barak Obama?
Barak Obama claims to be a christian. As such christian would be the "Correct Answer". That being said President Obama either did not attend church on a regular basis or outright lied that he didn't know what his pastor was preaching. Being a christian is not the same as claiming to be a christian. If he does not exhibit the characteristics or do the actions one expects a christian to do then it is fair for that person to claim he is not being a christian, and therefore not a Christian. I could go to the middle east and claim to be a Muslim but if I didn't pray at the times instructed the locals would claim otherwise.
The problem here is that the questions are asking how people view the president and social events. What religion does the president claim to be? is a fact. Is someone a "Christian", is a question in which someone tries to sum up the life experiences of that person and see if they measure up to a bar or bars.
I appreciate that slashdot has posted this post. Since this post has made it clear I need to, I will tell you why. This post which clearly misrepresents the facts is easily disputed. That being said many people have jumped on the band wagon using this data to insult fox news viewers. In doing so they have exposed their own idiocy by trying to claim an entire class of people are idiots.
The study was conducted by worldpublicopinion,org, which lists support from Tides Foundation, and United States Institute of Peace. These two groups (and I presume many of the others) have significant ties to the election of President Obama. A tiny bit of research and you can see that the study at very least is sponsored by groups biased against Fox News.
Do you know how the CBO calculated that the stimulus "saved and created millions of jobs?
They did it by assuming that each dollar of government spending results in 1.5 dollars of private spending.
BTW, please list a few of these "ubiased" economic experts. I have yet to actually hear of one by name.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Specifically, shilling for Bing as though the addition of the facebook "likes" crap is newsworthy.
Come on, a) the outfit who did the polling is supported by Leftist groups AND 2) the poll admits there are issues with other new sources. NPR and MSNBC were mentioned. The idea to single out Fox News is disingenuous at a minimum. We all know there are issues with all news sources and to single out one without the smartness to deal with the whole issue is childish.
Saying that Obama was born in the USA is a fact, not an opinion. If you think he wasn't, then you are wrong. Wrong is not as equally valid a point of view as right.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Why not? People not in this tax bracket certainly aspire to be in it one day. And people making over this are the ones that supply jobs. Increasing their taxes makes jobs scarcer.
Not necessarily true. You're assuming that there is some kind of trickle down effect in which rich people distribute their money to poorer people through jobs. An article from the huffington post shows that the opposite is true, that the income gap is widening. If it was true, that wealthy people create jobs, then the ~10% jobless rate should be mitigated right? It seems rather, that rich people either horde money or don't spend it as fast as needed to distribute the wealth. This isn't a problem caused by Bush, but just how the economy is shifting. I personally think that a strong middle class, you have a healthier more educated citizenship that can drive technology/innovation forward. If the middle class goes away, then you have a weaker economy because consumption goes down and demand for things to consume along with it.
Um, what? Please point to one article that proves this.
I was basing my point on the wikipedia link I provided. Here it is again link.
Last I checked, the Democrats controlled both houses and the Presidency
The problem with the Democrats is that they're not very well coordinated and are somewhat spineless. They did have the majority, but there was enough inner-party disagreement, which coupled with a coordinated GOP movement, made it difficult to pass anything.
I maintain that I still find it hard to think of Obama has a bad president when he's dealing with the selfish people within his own party, the crap leftover from Bush and probably Clinton administrations, and coordinated attacks by the GOP and Fox News (I imagine that very wealthy special interest groups are driving the propaganda here). It's just a matter of perspective.
I saw a bumper sticker yesterday that said
"TV: the more you watch,
the less you know."
I don't watch TV, so I'm just guessing that this might be true...
Check out the Wikipedia link he provided. Nearly all Democratic presidents in the table reduced the national debt, and nearly all Republicans increased it. He's point is well supported.
To do list for Windows
The quote for my page view was "Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. -- Euripides". Pretty much sums it up I think.
but, isn't this a little ironic that this poll is extremely biased, and it is.
* 72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit
How will it not?
* 72 percent believe the economy is getting worse
How is it not getting worse? Look at more numbers then just what they taught you in your first year of college macro econ class.
* 60 percent believe climate change is not occurring
Most everyone knows the climate is changing, this is probably people answering wrong. What they actually mean is that they do not believe it is a problem to worry about. Why can't they trust in their religions and believe that nothing real bad will come out of it. Especially when we only have enough data about global warming for IDK how long, half a century? In a world that has been around for at least 10,000 years.
* 56 percent believe Obama initiated the GM/Chrysler bailout
* 63 percent believe Obama was not born in the U.S. (or that it is unclear)
So, you are telling me that it is wrong for people to speculate things? Boy, what a world it would be if nobody ever questions others.
P.S. I'm not trying to come off as a hard headed conservative brat, but this poll seems like bullshit to me. The questions that were asked could all be worded in a way to make any group of people look stupid (manipulation.)
The difference is that in Socialist Germany, power resides with the government. In the US, our philosophy is that government works for us: the power belongs to the people. This is a fundamental tenet of our constitution.
Your message is a list of things that your government does for you. This is socialism. Socialism runs against our constitution, if you follow it. The problem that many americans have with how things are being run now is that it is unconstitutional -- the federal government is doing things that it does not technically have the power to do. Our constitution states that unless power is specifically given to the federal government, the power does not exist. For example, the constitution does not permit it to collect taxes without the assent of the people -- yet it does. The new healthcare system is also unconstitutional -- a judge just this week decided this -- and it will be appealed.
So the people you don't understand are simply asking the Feds to play by the rules established by the constitution. Nothing more, nothing less.
It matters because it's something to rile people up over. Doesn't matter if it makes sense or not. It's another imaginary point of contention that Fox news uses to keep it's viewers worked up about. If there isn't something to be outraged and upset over, their viewership would dwindle. That's how they make their money. Get people terrified over liberal-straw-man-of-the-day, then campaign vigorously against it. Be sure to tune in - we're fighting for your rights, America! That kind of crap.
Problem is, when gullible people believe their bullcrap and act on it. Like this guy. He's going to jail simply because he watches Fox news and believes what they say. His real crime is simply being gullible and believing what the "news" people told him.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
A business owner or CEO in the 250k bracket that has his taxes raised is not going to tell his company to hire fewer people.
Partnerships are pass-through entities, meaning the owner and the company are the same for tax purposes. The same is true for S-corps and LLCs taxed as S-Corps (though LLCs can elect to be taxed as C-corps, but it only makes sense to do so if your company is expected to re-invest profits in the company).
Additionally the business owner will anticipate his own reduced income and distribute a larger share of the company's profits to himself to compensate, reducing the cash pool available to hire new employees.
It's a valid point. It's less valid than taxing the fuck out of the top end and giving tons of free money to the bottom. The bottom is going to spend it buying the top half's products anyway, making them richer ten minutes later than they would have been if we reduced their taxes. Tax reductions don't make people rich, sales do.
Saying that Obama was born in the USA is a fact, not an opinion. If you think he wasn't, then you are wrong. Wrong is not as equally valid a point of view as right.
Upon what do you base your opinion that he was born in the USA?
I believe that he was, but I have not seen any solid evidence to that effect.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
http://google.com/search?q=Pacifica+KPFA+KPFK+WBAI+WPFW+KPFT
Listener-supported; no corporate ads/underwriting/censorship. Pretty much anything they have is stuff you won't get elsewhere.
http://www.kpfk.org/programs/programschedule.html#ja-content
"Democracy Now" is one program that my affiliate carries.
Something that is very applicable to this discussion is "Counterspin" produced by FAIR.org (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting). It is an analysis of the omissions, distortions, and outright lies by the corporate media in the previous week. I get it from the KPFK audio archive.
http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/
Ian Masters' Sunday - Thursday interview program is a don't-miss item for me.
Terrence McNally's "Free Forum" on Sunday is very much a think-outside-the-box thing.
gewg_
He's just not spending the inordinate amount of time it would take to personally convince every birther out there that what he says is true - especially since there's probably simply no possible evidence that would satisfy some of them, they'd just say he has the resources to fake it now. There's already been plenty of evidence produced that the man was born in Hawaii, more than enough to establish it beyond a reasonable doubt to anyone but a conspiracy theorist, and he has more important stuff to get on with.
Are you not paying attention?
All he has to do is release a copy of his birth certificate underacted. That is not an inordinate amount of time. In fact, it seems that it would have taken more time to blacken out the parts of what he has released in order to make it unverifiable.
The only reason Obama isn't releasing the entire birth certificate, is because he doesn't want this conspiracy stopped. Well, that or this is more then a conspiracy and the full release would expose it.
You can make all sorts of excuses, but none of them negate that.
On some level I'm glad Fox Business Network hasn't expanded out as far as FNC. Wait until the anti-beck crowd gets a load of John Stossel. I'm sure their heads will explode.
Personally I've never understood the vehement hatred of FNC. If you don't like it don't watch it. I've always been a right-leaning person and I remember when FNC first came our local cable. I had been watching things like Larry King up until then so to put it mildly O'Reilly and his "okay cut his mic" no-nonsense was incredibly different and appealing on some level.
Fox News was a news outlet "for the rest of us". When EVERY news outlet seemed to have a bias contrary to your values and beliefs it shouldn't be surprising something like Fox News was so throughly adopted.
I don't suppose anyone cares to know a slightly different perspective but here it is anyway. Despite my right-leanings I've never liked O'Reilly: he doesn't really have intellectual arguments for positions so much as stating a position and then repeating it over and over again. I think he's more for my my dad (in his mid-50s) than for me. I never liked Hannity either as he has the same issue as well as echoing everything from Limbaugh (that's the way he seemed five years ago, the last time I listened to him).
Fox news is like the MTV of news organizations. Assuming real news is something like the News Hour on PBS or reading a real news paper. If you get your news from only one source be in Fox News, MSNBC or Daily Show/Colbert you're really not getting a full picture of anything.
I have had a theory for a few years that the only reason FNC gets such (relative) high ratings is because of all the college kids watching it 24/7 waiting for some biased statement to come up so they can blog it. If you all just ignored it I think it would go away. Or at least be neck-and-neck with CNN.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
Well, you gotta admit, it's the same way in most places. Like coming to /. to reassure yourself that copyright is bad, wikileaks is good and the governments are out to censor everything away and are inherently against the people they're supposedly representing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
then along came the banking crisis due to unchecked, rampant capitalism that Fox and Republicans praise so much.
Are you sure that was all of it? I could of swore the Democrat enacted laws that required the banks to make loans without credit checks, to people who could not afford to pay them back was a big part of the banking crises. You know when those federally-backed loans started to default.
Mo Money!
Hmm.. I guess chemical weapons and fighter jets buried in the desert (against UN sanctions) cause enough damge to create enough destruction to be weapons of "mass" destruction... Just weapons of destruction...
Biased article.
Well done, sir.
I wonder . . . . could it be that the vast majority of Slashdot readers are white males, college educated, under the age of 30, living in the United States? If that is so, then we can safely predict the slant that will be observed in an empirical assessment of their political views. This group reliably expresses political opinions that are left of center, with party affiliation in the U.S. being, of course, Democratic. The rest falls into place. Man-made global warming, income redistribution, entitlement spending, growth of government, one-world government, Bush derangement syndrome, "there were no weapons of mass destruction," and so on.
And the Trade Centers were an inside job. Almost forgot that.
It's not an opinion that he was born in the USA. It's a fact. I know it's a fact because it has been reported as such by every reputable source I have checked. His birth certificate looks pretty convincing too, wouldn't you say?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
That may be ideologically uncomfortable to some, but again I prefer to go with the subject-matter experts. Unless there's a clear and obvious thing they're missing, of course.
As for a listing of unbiased economic experts, here's a partial list with their assessment of the jobs the stimulus created:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2010/feb/17/stimulus-report-card/
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
Oh no.... :(
The Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper loves to watch Fox News.
"The Prime Minister said he stopped watching television news five years ago, noting that he’s just “too invested” in the issues and stories. He joked that he’ll even tell his children to turn down the television if the news is on and he’s within earshot.
Rather, he scans the front pages of the newspapers every morning and lets his staff brief him on the rest of the news. He does, however, watch American political talk shows on Sunday morning. The network he watches the most is, of course, Fox News. "
(source: Globe and Mail, "Bob Rae’s tumble buys PM time before piano showdown", Jane Taber December 16, 2010)
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/bob-raes-tumble-buys-pm-time-before-piano-showdown/article1840240/
I wonder if there is a correlation between Stephen's stupid policies and his addiction to Fox "right wing propaganda brainwash" network.
Ugh. At least I can claim I didn't vote for him.
----- "Profanity is the one language that all programmers understand."
"In socialist Germany we have low unemployment and a trade surplus."
Germany has a different demographic reality than the USA.
Expand your comparison to include Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy.
And then imagine all those people being content to let Germany pay for their welfare states.
It's all a moot point anyway, not sure why people even have these discussions anymore. One thing you can count on in America is nothing will ever change. Money will always trump those pesky little facts. Might as well get used to it. We're just not intelligent enough as a society to figure shit out yet. If you thought you were unhappy before, just wait until Jan. 5. You'll think you've been raped by a train. Good luck.
I think a distinction is being lost here. Fox News i.e the nightly news and local news is actually pretty decent I would say no better or worse than abc, nbc etc Fox news channel's editorial O'Reilly Beck etc are what is commonly associated with Fox news and are editorial programs that are indeed exceedingly biased. Anyway don't lost sight of the fact that Fox news and Fox News Channel are not the same thing
Regardless of what the poll says, the name Fox News implies news coverage, which Fox News fails to do. That is why they should rename to GOP Opinions.
In socialist Germany, we have government sponsored universal health care that is alot cheaper and more efficient than in the U.S. I can go to the doc any time I want to and not have to worry about being able to pay the bills.
I have to call a bit of B.S. on this one. If you happen to already have a relationship with a good doctor who will accept the state insurance, then you're fine, but it can be very tough to get an speedy appointment with a competent doctor otherwise. And what percentage of your salary does that universal health care cost? Around 14% IIRC, which means that if you're pulling in €40000 / year (a good but not extravagant salary by German standards) then you're paying about €460 per month for that awesome universal health care. Without taking exchange rates into account, $460/month would get you some really nice health insurance in the U.S. - the kind that would let you go to any doctor whenever you want, and not worry about being able to pay the bills. Admittedly, when you're a relatively young factory worker with a stay-at-home wife and two kids, that insurance is a pretty good deal. For those of us who are single or with a working spouse (don't even get me started on the tax rates that a dual-income married couple has to pay), it's a poor value.
In socialist Germany, the state grants us legal protection from getting fired without good reason, unemployment benefits, parental benefits, grants for families with children, education sponsorships, the list goes on.
We've got that, too, except for the state protection from getting fired. Not to go off on too much of a tangent, but I really think that the Germans take employee protection and job security too far, while the Americans don't take it seriously enough. Somewhere in the middle would be nice.
In socialist Germany we have low unemployment and a trade surplus.
We cut jobs, you implement Kurzarbeit - I think you could make a good argument for either measure, but that's for another thread.
In socialist Germany, we have a state funded independent news organization that reports important facts from around the world from an unbiased standpoint, instead of reporting on the lives of teenaged girl-stars or the most recent, spectacular highway robbery.
You've got me there.
Us here on the old continent can't understand why in the world anyone would ever vote for the Republican party that so clearly is the political wing of the wealthiest 5%.
Believe me, lots of us here on the new continent can't figure it out, either.
--Nate
All USA news sources are bad. They are afraid to publish a lot of things, either because they will get raided or sued, or just because advertisers will run away. Stating one of them is bad, or even doing a comparison to other bad sources has no relevancy. Try comparing to some other sources around the world. How about comparing with BBC World news, or other sources that have a good reputation? The article itself is bad, sure, but the whole idea of trying to find a reason for how uninformed people are, should be done by looking at USA legislation and culture. The USA is rated 20th, well below most of Europe in the Reporters Without Borders Index 2009. How about doing something about that first and then see what the worst sources are inside the USA?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
So why does socialist Germany and other parts of utopian Europe need bailout money?
Don't think I want to follow Germany's footsteps. If you want our president, you can have him.
I personally find this story to be biased, I am a university student. And i can say with some certainty that these questions seem to be based on "official" documentation. Some or most of which has questionable origins. To perform a study such as this one you need to have a concrete control group, a baseline by which to compare the studies results too. You cant just pick a political opposition and say "Ok, anything that Is official, political, and disputed will be tested." you need to test against concrete results, such as what is the projected CO2 increase over the next 50 years, and how will it effect average global temperatures. Or how about a more recent published story if the CO2 concentration on the planet were to double what is the projected temperature increase, answer about 1.6 C not really a global catastrophe.
I actually have a professor who is big on global warming, after a whole semester of arguing with him about the subject i finally got the hard facts about it. 1) global warming is occurring. 2) it's not really a big deal, sure there will be some compensations required, such as India may need to build a barrier to prevent mass flooding due to ocean level rising. But other than that not much is needed the world won't be hurt that much. He even admitted that it won't cause the end of the world and we won't be greatly impacted by it, but it will be a pain to deal with. Note: this is from a professor who is a big advocate that we need to make major changes to adapt to global warming.
So global warming isn't really a subject to use as a baseline for a study.
As for Obama's origins well there is some dispute over them, and many people have not been convinced to a satisfactory level that his birthplace is really in the U.S. That so that isn't really a good topic for a conclusive study either. Health reform, and economy, really people are guessing at these numbers, this is a good topic for a study but not one that claims it's misinformation. Income taxes, have increased for some individuals, and there is a proposed end to some tax cuts. If the study had presented the income tax rate vs the area and income bracket where the questioned individual resides then this would be a valid point but as is this really shouldn't be presented in this study either.
Really this study isn't presenting that people are misinformed, just that what they believe is different from what the study considers correct. They are trying to discredit a popular news source with mostly conjecture. I'd like to see what the political relations are to this study, for example the study may have been performed on primarily republicans. Not enough information is given to draw a solid conclusion. Anyone who thinks there is needs to go back and take a real statistics class.
According to various things I have read at the time Obama was born the state of Hawaii would issue a Certificate of Live Birth any time in the first few months of a baby's life. So, for example, if a child was born in California, but the parents wanted it to be recorded as born in Hawaii, they could get a Certificate of Live Birth in Hawaii.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
They did that because that "assumption" is mainstream economic theory. That multiplier effect of stimulus spending backed by numerous studies over many decades, to the point that within economics it's considered settled.
You know it's amazing. Economists who say that politicians doing what politicians want (spend money) to do is good for the economy get hired to work for the government more than economists who say that it is bad for the economy. Oh yeah those economists who say what the politicians want to hear, also get more grant money from the government.
On the other hand, we saw what happens when you follow the economic policy behind the stimulus package. You see, they tried this sort of thing once before in the 1970s. In the 1970s, we had high unemployment and high inflation. Guess what, the economists who tell us how wonderful the stimulus package was are now saying that unemployment will remain high through 2014 or 2015 and we are starting to see inflation pick up.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Or he just doesn't care, because it's only a tiny minority who doubt his citizenship, and they wouldn't be convinced by anything; they'd just claim whatever document he supplied was faked. The word you want is "unredacted" not "underacted" BTW.
What puts a bur up my butt is the assertion that Fox News is Libertarian when in fact it is 100% Authoritarian Statist Conservative.
Fox got its audience by filling a news coverage vacuum when the lamestream media were carefully avoiding any right-of-center viewpoints. By giving roughly equal time to both major sides of issues they got a lock on half the viewership.
This held until the nomination race for the 2008 presidential run. Then it became apparent that they were covering the right from the viewpoint of only ONE of the four or so major and several minor factions that are associated with the Republican Party: The Neocon faction.
What was particularly blatant was their handling of Ron Paul, the only Libertarian in the Republican primary race.
(Fox now appears to be trying to fill the Libertarian coverage gap - by leaving the Fox News channel as the Neocon outlet and converting Fox Business Network into a Libertarian channel, with shows by Judge Napolitano and John Stossel just for starters.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You forgot a couple of things. First, the University of Maryland associated polling organization did the referenced poll in 2003. I went first to the site of the polling organization, and looked for the poll. I couldn't find it. Then I went to the Article and jumped to the referenced poll. Look at the date.
Wow! no wonder the Fox viewers didn't know much about President Obama. in 2003, he was an Illinois State Senator. Not even US.
The Article is extremely biased and dishonest. It's just a bunch of Mainstream Journalists who are worried that Fox is going to take their jobs. (Fox is blasting PBS, ABC, NBC and CBS in the ratings. Remember, )
Oh well, if you can't find something nasty to say, just make it up! that's what Dan Rather did. But, he got caught. then fired. Now the NY Times is coming off of a several year long string of being exposed reporting things that never were. But, it's all Fox's fault. Just like every mistake Obama has been called for is Bush's fault. You know, like that hurricane.
No wonder Slashdot has a reputation of being a hangout for immature leftist juveniles.
There are some things I have read about on Fox News (internet site, I don't watch broadcast news. Too many opinions masquerading as news with limited sound bites.) You can not get the meaning of a half hour speach in one 15 second sound bite. I get that whenever i watch Fox, CNN, CBS, ABC, etc. I prefer to read online. Fox, CNN, some PBS. WSJ, a little Politico. also, Science News, Scientific American, Space.Com. The mainstream media can't seem to understand what science and technology reporting is. All of them seem to think that a new video game is what Science and Technology reporting is. Sad.
On the subject of Barack Obamas birth, Hawaii says that he was born there. OK, subject closed. He qualifies. Per Fox News.
On the subject of the Health Care thing, a majority of Americans oppose it. That explains the recent congressional elections. the Democrats are still smarting and lying about that one. Kind of like what the Republicans did 4 years ago. maybe the Dems would be better off if they did watch Fox.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
My experience growing up and living over half my life in Germany and Austria - Europeans are woefully uniformed about American politics - you accept at face value that you have a state funded news organization that reports with an unbiased standpoint.
The Europeans loved the idea of Obama before they even know what or who he was. Obama has no record and only two years in office. I have a hard time fathoming the European love affair with Obama - Nobel Peace Prize worthy? Are you kidding?
Germany has a low unemployment relative to the United States at this point in time. For the last twenty years German unemployemnt was about 30-40% higher than in the US.
I'm not a conservative. I value freedom above everything else, including secure employement (my responsibility), health care (also my responsibility) and security (ditto). I'm sure you don't agree with me, but I dont thing you are an idiot - I try to understand why you need to be taken care of by the state, its just not for me.
Even if that is so, it's completely the opposite of what you said before.
And yes, that was the word I was looking for. In fact, that was the word I thought I wrote. Must have fat fingered it or something.
"I see stupid people. They're walking around like regular people, but they're stupid, and they don't even know they're stupid!"
All i have to say is, why does someone care so much to write an article about it? there are no facts supporting this claim.. its all just opinion. Seems like more of an attack on FoxNews.. haha idc either way but honestly.. who cares? if you disagree with everything FoxNews stands for then good for you. Getting together in an online blog and complaining about it..? Lot of good that is going to do. Maybe write your senator or the white house expressing your views and do something that could potentially make a difference. n00bs
It happens, and it's difficult to notice if the typo is also a valid word. My two comments are in complete agreement though, so you're misreading as well as mistyping.
Yes, Yes. If you check the sponsors of this PIPA organization, you'll see that a whole raft of leftist moneypots are supporting them including TIDES which is funded by George Soros who's feeling the pressure put on him by Beck, who works for.... guess who?
FOX
Therefore it's not going to take a great leap of deduction to see that this is a faux study with a predetermined outcome created to smear FOX in order to help Soros out. Soros' little groups have been doing this for a long time through more overt channels like Media Matters and keep getting exposed for the shills they are. Cmon guys, you're geeks.. you're smarter than to buy the same old 'FOX is evil/stupid and the Legacy Media is good/smart/right/chosen/whatever' narrative.
you must be new here...
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Which specific 1970's programs are you referring to? I'm not recalling any WPA-style programs or large infrastructure projects - which are the kinds of stimulus the economists state have that multiplier effect.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
Duh.
We dream to become wealthy.
"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." ~Winston Churchill That's the one thing I love about you bleeding heart liberals: You are quick to judge somebody based on what someone else tells you rather than determining for yourself. Most of those surveys (which by the way are biased to get rid of FOX News) only interview a small percentage of the population and adjust the numbers to represent the greater population. The mere assumption that all FOX News viewers are ignorant or stupid is preposterous. That's the same as saying that all MSNBC viewers are ignorant or stupid. This of course is not true because that may only represent a small portion of society. Many FOX News viewers are well read on both sides of the spectrum.
This survey is flawed and the sponsors are biased. Did anyone take note that most of the sponsors are radically liberal groups, like the Tides Foundation supported by George Soros? Flaws include: 1. SMALL SAMPLE SIZE: Only 616 people. 1100-1200 respondents for 300 million population of the US is required a much more accurate result statistically. How do we know if a truly random sample of the population was achieved? Without a truly random sample the whole survey is fatally flawed. 2. WORDING OF QUESTIONS: How you word questions in any survey affects the resulting answers. I found the framing of several questions to be suspect. 3. ASSUMPTIONS/PRESUPPOSITIONS OF SURVEYORS: It was clear to me after reading through the survey that the sponsors were looking for a particular result, and they (in their minds) found what they were looking for. They did not begin with open minds on the topic. Read through their introduction and even the title of the survey. You will see what I mean. If Gallup or Rasmussen (two unbiased organizations of undisputed integrity) conducted this survey I suspect the results would be quite different. As-is, this survey is just rubblish. DV DV
The only thing that can explain this discrepancy between european and the broad american view on what is going on in your own country, is the tremendous influence held by misinforming "News" Corporations, such as Fox News.
I don't think that's it. Most of the delusional behavior you describe was around before there was a Fox news, back when there were three fairly responsible and slightly left leaning networks.
Half the country supports the tyranny of the elite because it appears to benefit them relative to the other half. Also, nearly everyone is trying to get away with something in life, at the expense of someone else, and that blinds them to what's really going on.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the US is bigger than Germany, with more ethnic diversity, and a different history. What works in Europe would not necessarily work here. My large city is more than half composed of recent immigrants, mostly from Vietnam and China. They're smart and they work hard, but most of the ones I know don't really seem to get political pluralism, or care very much about it. Somehow we have to make this all work. Yes, American society is deeply delusional and immoral in a lot of ways, but its not as if what seems to work in Europe would completely apply here.
You state that the survey was "designed, year after year, to bash Fox News"... Do you have proof?
In particular you demonstrate a primary failure of reasoning. You presume that because "the survey" repeatedly reveals the same result, it must a-priori be designed to falsify that result based on the fact that you assume or believe the result to be false.
One of the problems with this kind of reasoning is that it is too self-serving to be valid. All honest testing of a proposition must always be designed to _disprove_ a base proposition.
That said, the statement "is less informed" has no relationship to the statement "is wrong" despite various inferiority complexes common to the, frankly, less informed. For instance, imagine a guy who knows exactly one thing: "If I release this object from shoulder height, while standing in my living room, it will fall to the floor." He is completely correct. He lacks untold vistas of information, but he is absolutely, 100%, correct.
So the observed set "Fox News Viewers" and the observed set "less informed viewers" show very strong, but directional, overlap. (That is, a disproportionate number of Fox Viewers are under-informed, but no conclusion has been made as to whether a disproportionate number of under-informed people watch Fox news. That is, we can conclude that well-informed people avoid Fox News disproportionately, not that Fox News is factually incorrect.)
As to being "well informed"; information is neither opinion nor "correctness". For instance, I am reasonably informed about several religions which I do not practice. I am well informed about nuclear power generation technologies, but I have no task involving generation of power via nuclear means. I know a lot about women's issues but I am male.
The reason that it "stings you" to be called under-informed as a Fox News viewer (two conditions I imply directly from your defensive-sounding response) is that you have been taught that "more informed" opinions and world views are generally "more _likely_ to be correct." Sadly, for Fox News viewers, this is generally a truth.
The fact of the matter is that the more informed a person is, the more they understand about the positions of their rivals _AND_ their cohorts, the less likely they are to be _misled_.
Were I to draw social conclusions from the information provided, I would tend to believe that Fox News viewers are engaged in the practice of allowing personal bias to influence their willingness to entertain positions that have not been pre-vetted for conformance to their world views. That is, Fox News viewers don't seem to _want_ the correct information and are willing to presume things like "the survey is designed to bash Fox News" rather than to analyze the survey for its actual content.
Of course this fits my "confirmation bias" nicely, so who is to say that I am correct...?
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
(Before you get all anti-eugenicist, read the post...)
Right now if you get seriously ill there is a strong possibility that your treatment would be limited or your policy "retroactively canceled" by an anonymous functionary acting unilaterally and impersonally with zero accountability from the depths of a hidden cube farm whole states away from you. Such ruling performed in secret, possibly, in the case of limited treatment, without you ever knowing about it.
Notice that the private insurance carriers defended retroactive cancellation of health care policies (I cannot remember their sanitized term for this just now) by saying that only about one-in-two-hundred people suffer that occurrence industry wide. Nobody seemed to notice that about one-in-two-hundred people with health care suffer serious conditions that result in very high cost long-term payouts by health care providers. (Both numbers are unproved as far as I could find, but they were both cited in the same general context by similarly informed and reasonably-likely-to-be-correct individuals so I will use them for their apparent value here.)
Requiring that such decisions to revoke or limit treatment would involve "a panel" instead of a random accountant, and that they happen in some sort of public and reviewable context, and according to some rigorous process sounds like a large-scale net win to me.
During all the shouting I firmly wished I had some screen time to respond to the Tea Baggers etc with "that is an outstanding idea! I will see about adding cancellation review panels to the bill immediately rather than let you be left to die solely on the decision of your _financial_ case worker."
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
The conclusion is inescapable. Fox News is deliberately misinforming its viewers and it is doing so for a reason.
There is not even enough doubt about this for it to be worth writing an article, and the failure of this article to conclusively prove this fact is laughable and somewhat sad. Fox news is known around the world to be deliberate misinformation. I think it is also silly to simply shout correlation != causation as the first post did, as though correlation proves the complete absence of causation. We learn from and gain our understanding of the world from the news sources we read. To say that a news source that so blatantly disregards even the basics of journalistic integrity has no effect on it's viewers' level of informedness about the world is absurd and untenable.
None of the factors listed doesn't necessarily mean that the outcome is flawed.
However a survey that gives skewed results covering a small population means that a larger survey is useful in order to verify or discard the results of the first survey.
And it also depends on how the sponsors have influenced the survey.
At least - don't discard the results before they are verified to be incorrect.
As for the presented outcome of the survey - I'm not really surprised because from what I have seen from FOX isn't always well-balanced news reporting. In too many cases when I have been watching that channel they seems to find faults when it comes to democrats and others that doesn't hold the republican or right-wing republican stance, but they are seldom trying to find flaws on the republican side - or they try to play down those flaws.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Why should he compare a republic to a state. Germany is a republic.
So in comparison in Germany people in Massachusetts (e.g. Bavaria) indeed subsidize the healthcare of Wyoming (e.g. Mecklenburg)
Oh and about the rest of Europe. Belgium is also made out of different states where one state subsidizes the other.
And no, we do not have intercountry subsidization as you do not have with Canada or Mexico.
Please stop watching Fox as you are wrongly informed into thinking otherwise.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Those who haven't yet figured out that FOX News is for fools are, regrettably, too stupid to live, as is currently being demonstrated by the all-powerful engine of Reality which is at this very moment gobbling up your rights, homes, savings, jobs, food and fairly soon, your bodies.
So moving right along. . .
While FOX News ranks at the very tippy-top on the American Propaganda charts, it remains a further regrettable truth that NO news on TV is any damned good. There are huge realities which the human media shies away from like a powerless mother incapable of dealing a child's disobedience, or perhaps the horrible truth of a molesting father. In the same way, the media pretends a whole raft of astonishing truths simply do not exist, all in order to keep this weird little charade we call, "normal" puffed up with just enough air to keep all the slaves limping toward the death camps.
The result is that our entire society is completely mind-fucked. Surviving day to day in a state of cognitive dissonance where everybody is either acting with a fake smile or is so lost that they really believe their actions and minds are their own. We must pity those fools; They are the ones who spend time actually watching FOX News with a straight face.
-FL
Then please get the fuck out of countries where you should not be, including Germany, Japan and a lot others.
I do not give a rats ass if those countries want you there, if you say you are not interested, get out. Otherwise it is clear that you are interested.
The fact that Europeans talk about American politics is because we are informed. The average American has no clue about anything European, except that they call themselves -American.
And you know WHY we Europeans are informed? We do not watch Fox 'News'.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
What WPA-style programs or large infrastructure projects were in the stimulus legislation?
According to everything I can find only about $100 billion out of the about $800 billion went to large infrastructure projects. Yet, the various economists who calculate it created jobs use the 1.5 multiplier on the whole $800 billion.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Equally astounding, Fox viewers also believe that
1.) Dick Cheney is not Satan
2.) The Drive By Media IS biased towards the Ultra Lefties
3.) Fox is the ONLY network providing fair and balanced news (remember Dan Blather and his fake document scandal?)
4.) Fox is the only network to support Juan Williams who was kicked to the curb by NPR (a government agency) for speaking his mind.
5.) The second Amendment does in fact GUARANTEE the right to bear arms!
6.) The 9th and 10 amendments preclude the federal government from regulating Healthcare or anything not spelled out in the first 8 amendments.
7.) The other media outlets are jealous of Fox's ratings
8.) Sarah Palin is a REAL American
9.) President Obama needs to provide documentation of his citizenship, as well as supply the credentials to prove he is not an "illegitimate president".
10.) Global warming is not caused by Man.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
My father in law just got over bacterial meningitis. He almost died. After 1 week in the hospital, 1 surgery to correct the entry point of the bacteria and 1 week in rehab, the bill was $200K. Insurance picked up most of it. Without it, he would have been destitute. He would have had to sell his house which took 30 years to pay for. All the high and mighty who think that's ok, wait until you get old. I remember when I was in my 20s I had the same cavalier attitude. 'Why should I have to pay these crazy premiums?' I'd ask. 'I don't get sick'. Well, once you or someone close to you experience a serious disease and the associated costs with surviving it, you will sing a different tune. Costs need to be stabilized and everyone needs to be covered. What burns me is that we already pay a LOT of taxes. If there was less waste, everyone would been able to be covered by the govt with the existing tax outlay.
High-speed rail projects in multiple states. Infrastructure projects in same for repairing bridges and roads, as well as Federal funding for state jobs and services. This came out to about $499 billion of $787 billion according to politifact. And in fact a major criticism of the stimulus program was not enough of this form of stimulus, and instead contained nearly 1/3 tax cuts.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/feb/10/jon-stewart/stewart-claims-stimulus-bill-one-third-tax-cuts/
Your turn. What are you referring to in the 1970's, which had or resembled large-infrastructure projects or WPA-style programs?
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
Dude! Isn't EU broke!!!
In a perfect country, there would be no income taxes and everyone would have to provide for themselves. I shouldn't owe anyone any piece of what I earn.
Ah, but you don't earn in a vacuum. You *cannot* earn in an unstable society; if there are food riots and rampant crime due to complete hopelessness and lawlessness in the lower classes, good luck running a successful business of any kind (other than organized crime). You gain many, MANY indirect benefits from not living in a dysfunctional hellhole like, say, Somalia.
There will ALWAYS be those who do not provide for themselves, and they must be provided for to prevent them from damaging society to a larger degree. Think of it as a cost of doing business. Just like shrinkage, it is cost-prohibitive and damaging to eliminate it entirely, so it must be minimized (as best is possible) and tolerated.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
But... In this case the only fact would be a birth certificate. The one that has never been produced for review unless I missed something. So what "fact" was used to determine the claim that he is a US citizen?
I don't think people would "give up on the less fortunate". At least I wouldn't. But I want to choose which organization it goes to. A well-run private enterprise (including charities) is an enormous improvement over any government-run program.
And government education may mean lower crime (I have never studied this), it certainly doesn't mean higher paying jobs. It means everyone is taught at the same level, and and that more jobs will be geared towards that level.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
Despite being killed over and over again, somehow this myth that Fannie and Freddie and the CRA were responsible persists. Here's just one instance of it being killed.
If they're responsible, why, then, did the same housing bubble happen in other countries?
sounds like you STILL dont understand why correlation doesnt imply causation
Oh, it can imply causation, it just doesn't proof it. Once you passed your statistics class, you might look into metaphysics or philosophy of science. It's called the problem of induction.
Oh ma gawd- I can't believe I actually answered one of these "correlation is not causation"-posts.
And...?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
obama a terrible president. government regulation of business is not going to help poor or middle class. it just means that the elite are writing regulations that help big business. we didn't need obama's healthcare overhaul, we needed less government involvement in healthcare. all i've seen government do to anything is make it corrupt, costly and inefficient. how much more do we need the wealthy taxed? they already pay half the income tax in USA. i want them investing in USA, not just letting their money go idle or sending it overseas so it will hide from taxes. i don't blame them wanting to hide it from taxes either. the government just wastes it most of the time. and that moron actually supports the TSA, so now if i want to fly I have to go get my balls touched by someone who hasn't changed his glove from the last 100 passengers he's touched and who knows how many diseases i'll get. obama's doesn't want to help the middle and lower class, but rather make the middle class poor. the democrats here don't want a prosperous country, it's not to their political advantage. i'm dirt poor but i'm not a simpleton enough to think the democratic party or Obama is the solution to my troubles.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. We unfortunately live in a society where today the majority of individuals who think they are 'free thinkers' have more of a 'plagiarist mindset'. This has rapidly become of increasingly wide acceptance in society and education as a whole. Critical and objective thinking has pretty much gone out the window, because that requires more time of an individual than many are willing to spend. For instance, when their papers are due for a project, or they create other forms of expressing through the network system, they often do not have any fresh new ideas of their own. It is much easier for them to use others thinking or ideas, twist it to meet their predisposed robotic mindset, in order to expedite the ease of the assignment. They only consume others unsubstantiated projected thoughts (then infusing their own ideological bias) and regurgitate those thought/ideas without critical thinking of what is actually being said. Then it is often consumed again by the same type of people who will not decipher fact from fiction and accept it Card Blanche, then to only pass it on untested. It is further clear they do not have to wait for facts to inconvenience or interfere with their haste to report. They then purport this to be open and objective un-bias news, ideas, or expression. If this is merely an attempt to stimulate discussion and not try and press a point of view, then more power to them. If this is to only give an unfounded point of view in order to inaccurately criticize a segment of society or 'fox viewers' in general, then shame on them. It is often amazing at how much passion is exuded over feeling, polls, thoughts, and view points that did not originate with themselves. I guess that would be faux passionate expression. I do give them credit for opening this dialogue as long as they accept all facets and not only ones that agree with them. You are an example of not taking something at face value without first checking/testing it out. Your FACT finding gives legitimacy to your statements. Great job!
Cause those of us here on the new continent have been close to both sides long enough to know that the only real difference between the republicans and the democrats is that the republicans are more obvious/less stealthy about what they are doing and the democrats are much better at covering their agenda.
They really aren't any different in general, both suck, but you occasionally have one side doing the right thing and so you take that into account, vote accordingly for the 'best' on either side and stop voting based on which 'team'. The only intelligent voters left in America are the ones who don't check the 'default party' checkbox and actually vote for a PERSON that does what they feel is right rather than for the red or blue team.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
It's a valid point. It's less valid than taxing the fuck out of the top end and giving tons of free money to the bottom. The bottom is going to spend it buying the top half's products anyway, making them richer ten minutes later than they would have been if we reduced their taxes. Tax reductions don't make people rich, sales do.
Actually you just made a valid point for taxing the rich in that the poor will eventually spend money to buy their products. Only in this scenario, it promotes jobs through work and production. Conversely, if people don't have money to spend, there's less demand for stuff, less work, and rich people ultimately become poorer. Individuals are rich, not just by the size of their bank accounts but by what society produces for them as well: technology, healthcare, infrastructure, etc.
Since Fox demonstrably and deliberately puts out misinformation, it is demonstrably true that people who rely on Fox for information are necessarily mis-informed, less-informed and un-informed. Fox relies on two never-fail money-making ideas:
1.The Big Lie: Say it loud enough and often enough and most people will start to believe it.
2. No-one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American (substitute nationality of your choice) public.
Hows that. in your first comment you said he was too busy to do some simple job of releasing a birth certificate without anything blackened out on it. In the second post, you said he simply didn't care. Well, those aren't one in the same are they?
You forgot a couple of things. First, the University of Maryland associated polling organization did the referenced poll in 2003. I went first to the site of the polling organization, and looked for the poll. I couldn't find it. Then I went to the Article and jumped to the referenced poll. Look at the date.
Dude, where on Earth did you get that from?
TFA is here.
It references a summary of the poll, which is dated December 9, 2010.
The summary includes a link to a PDF of the full report, which on page 3 says:
To this end, WorldPublicOpinion.org conducted an in-depth survey of public opinion. The poll was fielded from November 6 to 15, 2010.
I guess people see what they want to see, regardless of how outlandish it is (like believing a poll from 2003 would ask about Illinois state senator Obama... puh-lease!).
The very first one they list is the large number of Fox News viewers who think that the stimulus legislation lost jobs. Well, the U.S. economy has lost quite a few jobs since the stimulus legislation was passed, so it is perfectly legitimate to blame the stimulus legislation. However, that is an opinion.
Not the way it was framed in the study. The study asked what the respondent thought the consensus was among economists, which is verifiable.
Furthermore, how is that a valid opinion? The argument you gave is post hoc ergo propter hoc, a logical fallacy and not a valid basis for an informed opinion. Do you have another line of reasoning that leads to the conclusion that the stimulus could have lost jobs? It certainly doesn't *seem* possible to me that borrowing a ton of money that you haven't yet paid back and then injecting it into the economy could do anything, in the short term, but *create* jobs, but I don't discount the possibility that there's something I'm missing.
Seriously, it's like if I took out a loan, started a business, hired some people, and then someone at the bank looked at job figures for the entire town I live in, saw that the number of jobs had decreased, and then concluded that the loan they gave me was to blame. Absurd.
Seriously, it's like if I took out a loan, started a business, hired some people, and then someone at the bank looked at job figures for the entire town I live in, saw that the number of jobs had decreased, and then concluded that the loan they gave me was to blame. Absurd.
No, it's like you had an established business and took money from the most profitable part of your business and used it to hire people in the least profitable part of your business, gave a bonus to the managers of that division and were then surprised when the manager of the profitable part told you that they had to lay off more of their staff than the number that the unprofitable part hired.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
In the article posted at alternet.com, toward the bottom:
"By the way, the rest of the media was not blameless. CNN and the broadcast network news operations fared only slightly better in many cases. Even MSNBC, which had the best record of accurately informing viewers, has a ways to go before it can brag about it."
So they are all pretty bad, but Fox News Channel is the one mentioned in the headline, and MSNBC is supposed to be the one that's really fair and balanced? Pardon me if I think this study/survey is more biased than the news organizations it is supposed to be evaluating.
No, it's like you had an established business and took money from the most profitable part of your business and used it to hire people in the least profitable part of your business, gave a bonus to the managers of that division and were then surprised when the manager of the profitable part told you that they had to lay off more of their staff than the number that the unprofitable part hired.
Ok, so my analogy was based on the idea that the government borrowed money to pay for the stimulus (as it always does with deficit spending), and then injected that money into the economy (a move which, on its face, will nearly *always* create some jobs). Hence it is roughly analogous to me borrowing some money and then founding a business (though it would be more like if I borrowed some money and then engaged in venture capitalism, but that's a nitpick, I think). So now that I've explained the reasoning behind my analogy, would you be so kind as to explain yours?
Well, whatever, I have already said you were wrong, wrong about how much time and effort it would take, wrong about your premise that he's too busy to do it that changed to something more believable, he simply doesn't care.
You have responded with the mental equivalent of "yea huh" as your defending statement laced with a little "you're stupid". I guess since you have nothing resembling anything of value to add to this, we should end it.
Yes, my analogy is that the government does not produce wealth, it can only take money from one part of the economy and spend it in a different part of the economy. Money that the government spends is money that cannot be spent on something else, even if they borrowed the money.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Yes, my analogy is that the government does not produce wealth, it can only take money from one part of the economy and spend it in a different part of the economy. Money that the government spends is money that cannot be spent on something else, even if they borrowed the money.
Well, they don't exactly take money from the economy in any form other than taxation, and they didn't increase taxes.... So are you suggesting that the stimulus package came at the expense of some other government spending that was doing a better job of creating or maintaining jobs? Which program or programs, specifically, were cut to pay for the stimulus package?
If you're not speaking to any particular program that was cut and rather just suggesting that the money could have been spent on something better, that doesn't fit your analogy and it isn't a line of reasoning that explains job loss. Your analogy requires that the money be taken from a successful enterprise and that existing jobs are consequently lost. They can't be imaginary projected jobs from some speculated alternative spending.
For someone claiming to have looked into the article and poll your post is pretty misleading, as I expect intended. Alternet's article states that the poll results shows that Fox News viewer were more informed than other sources, they did not state that was the claim of the poll. It is also worth noting that Fox News was the only news source to have its own list detailing the topics on which its viewers were most misinformed. Of the 11 topics covered in the paper, daily Fox viewers were the most misinformed in 8, and just short in 2 more. In the other topic a debunked scandal on Republics Fox viewers were slightly edged out print for most informed, hardly surprising that Fox would ensure people knew about it.
I'll end with a quote the parent omitted however, for some news sources on some issues, higher levels of exposure increased misinformation.
They borrowed the money from somewhere, that money was not available to lend to some more productive use.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I'm shocked, shocked, I say. Have to agree with the causi pro causi folks, though: Ignorant people flock to FAUX News specifically because they wish to remain ignorant and, indeed, to get strokes for it.
Funny but I think it just adds to the negativity and "he-said she-said, my weenie is bigger than yours" thing this country has going on right now. Interesting information, but dumb.
So in effect, your standard is that the money have the best possible positive impact, and anything less than that is a negative impact. Then the proper analogy would be that I borrowed money from the bank, started a business, hired some people who did not previously have jobs and thus created jobs, but it wasn't the best possible business for job creation and hence I lost hypothetical jobs that never existed but we speculate might have existed had my choice been more optimal. My but that is a stretch, and does not meet any reasonable definition of loss.....
Am I being trolled? If not, I apologize for the condescension, but I have a hard time imagining that this is a good faith argument. Argue the stimulus was inefficient if you like, and you could theoretically even be right, but this is not a reasonable argument in support of the idea that the stimulus could have lost jobs.
NO, if that money was not used by the government it would have been used by someone else. To use your analogy, you borrowed money from the bank to start a business that a year later employed 10 people. Because the bank loaned you that money they didn't have it to loan to the guy who came in the next day to get money to keep his business running until his customers could pay their bills, as a result he had to layoff/fire his 20 employees.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Show me one example of an actual person anywhere in this country who would have gotten a loan but didn't because the federal government of the United States of America tapped out the bank first. The government acquires money by selling government bonds, largely to the central bank or to other countries (China, for instance). In short, I call bullshit.
But even if your analogy was correct and there was some hypothetical next guy who could have gotten that money, how on earth do you know what he would have used it for? Furthermore, it sounds like your hypothetical guy is running a failed business. Why should he get a loan to stay afloat? Is he too big to fail? Honestly, your example doesn't even appear to meet your own standard for being the best possible use of that money. Better to invest it in a new business that doesn't need new injections of cash from an outside source to stay afloat.
Argh! Endogeneity problems! The study does not demonstrate causality, only correlation. What the study seems to demonstrate is that people select news coverage that echos their own biases.
Previous polls have indicated that the half of the Slashdot readership lives outside the US, so it is quite unlikely that a majority of Slahdot readers completely fit your description, it would be a large minority at best.