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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!
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.
There have been numerous instances that make me disagree with this. The Newscorp organization pushes disinformation for profit. For example, the news program regularly reports that there are "reports of..." reports which are simply quoting what the lunatics in Fox News talk shows say. They don't bother to look into it or debunk, it, they just report it like it is credible news. And then there is corporate ethics. As far as I know, Fox is the only news corporation that went to court and argued that it was their first amendment right to fire reporters for refusing to knowingly lie about the dangers of drugs produced by one of their advertisers. And they're right, they do have the right to fire those reporters and lie to the public or bury the story... but that completely destroys their credibility as a news channel and that of any program they carry.
Basically, while there is a lot of bias and poor research going on in US media today, Fox is actually worse than all the others and this study reflects some of that. Frankly I think the only reason to anyone would trust anything seen on the Fox news channel is ignorance about what kind of an organization is running the show.
1) Fox News makes its viewers less informed. (What headline said, which is impossible.)
Clearly you've never watched Glenn Beck.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Not only that, but if you look at the actual study, even non-FOX News viewers believe a lot of crazy stuff, and it's more indicative the personal biases and beliefs of people who choose to watch FOX News, not that FOX News "makes you stupid".
You might find this study an interesting read.
Notable:
"All of the news outlets except Fox News Special Report received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Moreover, by one of our measures all but three of these media outlets (Special Report, the Drudge Report, and ABCs World News Tonight) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than to the median member of the House of Representatives. One of our measures found that the Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox News Special Report is the most centrist."
and
"Based on sentences as the level of observation (the results of which are listed in Table 8), the Drudge Report is the most centrist, Fox News Special Report is second, ABC World News Tonight is third, and CBS Evening is last.
Given that the conventional wisdom is that the Drudge Report and Fox News are conservative news outlets, this ordering might be surprising. Perhaps more surprising is the degree to which the mainstream press is liberal. The results of Table 8 show that the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, and CBS Evening News are not only liberal, they are closer to the average Democrat in Congress (who has a score of 74.1) than they are to the median of the whole House (who has a score of 39.0). ...the New York Times is twice as far from the center as Fox News Special Report, to gain a balanced perspective, one would need to spend twice as much time watching Special Report as he or she spends reading the New York Times. ...Our results contrast strongly with the prior expectations of many others. It is easy to find quotes from prominent journalists and academics who claim that there is no systematic bias among media outlets in the U.S. ... The main conclusion of our paper is that our results simply reject such claims."
Keep in mind that they are ONLY looking at the evening news shows; if you included the opinion/editorial shows from FOX News, which constitutes nearly all of the evening/prime-time programming, I'm not sure what would happen to the results... ;-)
Here's a 2007 interview of Ron Paul on NPR:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12224561
Here's one from CBS News:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/25/politics/politicalplayers/main3412826.shtml
I stopped bothering to search after that. If Ron Paul was good for ratings, he'd get more coverage.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
The people that wrote that report might want to look up the word liberal in the dictionary. The democratic party isn't even close to being "liberal". They, like the republicans, are authoritarian statists....
It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.
Besides the many other good suggestions, I'd highly recommend Salon, and Glenn Greenwald in particular. You might also try The Nation, although it can stray into bleeding-heart territory at times.
You can also learn a heck of a lot by reading foreign news media, such as the BBC or Al Jazeera.
I am officially gone from
Joe Scarborough is a host on MSNBC. Phil Griffin, the head of MSNBC, is rabidly right wing. There are no liberals at all on Fox News. MSNBC hosts a few shows that have a liberal bias. The network itself is not liberal.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Several of the items clearly demonstrate belief in incorrect information (the last four items listed are good examples), but there were several that aren't so simple, two in particular:
1) For the first - you cannot know what would happen if the stimulus was not put in place - more investing could occur, and more people could have gotten jobs. In my opinion - the stiumulus probably did more good than harm in the job front, but I certainly can't say the for certain until I get access to an alternative universe that was identical up until the stimulus legislation.
2) The second one - Again, there are many ways of estimating the economy, some will suggest better, some will suggest worse. The unemployment index, IMHO, is garbage, especially when the timeframe you can obtain unemployment increases. This is probably what they are basing it on, and the increase in unemployment actually matches quite well with the increase in time people can receive unemployment benefits. Still with something as complex as the economy, better or worse can very easily be in the eye of the beholder. So, this is also quite subjective.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Daily consumers of MSNBC and public broadcasting (NPR and PBS) were higher (34 points and 25 points respectively) in [incorrectly] 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.
So basically the real story here is that if you watch television news, you are more misinformed than if you don't. Thanks for the non-partisan spin, guys.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
From the actual survey, let's see some of the questions they asked people:
This "poll" is so insanely poor it's not even funny. As a statistics teacher, I'm frankly thankful for things like this because it's fodder for my classroom discussions as we tear apart the problems with the poll. It's rife with bias (in the statistical sense, not in the political sense), on a variety of fronts. First off, there's potential undercoverage bias, since they "scientifically" randomly choose participants based off of telephone numbers and residential addresses - two types of situations that can typically undercover for bias. What if a person has no phone number to choose (or an unlisted/cell number)? Let's not overlook the simple possibility of people who are currently homeless - perhaps as a result of the economy being quizzed about.
Next, there's always nonresponse bias involved. They selected people and asked if they'd like to participate. From the results posted, it's impossible to tell how much nonresponse bias is present since they always lumped together "don't know / refused" for their data reports. Classically simple way of fudging how many people refuse to respond to a question.
There are a handful of potential response bias situations in the questions being asked, of course. Question #35 deals with people's belief in Obama's birthplace. However, the que
Londovir
Pay... cash... $20,000... What planet do you live on? There's a reason I don't drive a new car. The old one is paid for and $20,000 is a bit out of my current budget. I make good money and one or two little doctor visits like that in a five year period would completely decimate me.
The average income for a family of four in this country is $50,000 a year before taxes. Assuming that your Libertarian paradise lowers taxes to say 10%, that leave $45,000 as a median net income. So one $20,000 medical bill is approximately half of that. One serious medical problem in a family of four people could instantly and immediately take half of their income away. And that's for people with median income. 20% of the population make 20K or less a year. One serious illness just totally takes out their ENTIRE ANNUAL INCOME.
"Freedom of Choice is preferable to being treated like a child too dumb to make his/her own decisions"
That a pure platitude. It doesn't answer the question. It doesn't even address the question. Your "solution" would work for the top 5 or 10% of the wage earning public, and even for many of them it would be painful as Hell. When I make $150,000 a year I might be *able* to afford a $20K doctor's bill, but even then it would hurt.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/hannity-tea-party-footage-daily-show/
http://www.examiner.com/extreme-weight-loss-in-national/sean-hannity-of-fox-news-apologizes-for-video-lies-on-anti-health-care-reform-rally
There you go.
The real question is: does where Obama was born even matter? That's why I don't understand the birthplace conspiracy theorists. I mean, the Constitution's Natural Born Citizen requirement just means not a Naturalized Citizen. Obama's mother was a US citizen at his birth, so Obama was born a citizen regardless of where he was born, so what's the big deal?