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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!
You are right, of course. It's not that Fox News makes people stupid, it's that stupid people watch Fox News.
Remember folks, just because you agree with it doesn't make it unbiased!
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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.
They didn't even limit their questions to objectively provable facts.
Just to give one example: Has the US "lost jobs" or "gained jobs"? The way you word that question is going to greatly influence how people answer. If the number of jobs increased in absolute terms, but the increase was less than the number of people who entered working age due to population growth do you count this as a gain or a loss? Many of the other questions are similarly subjective and easily manipulated.
Between the institute that ran the survey and Fox News it's hard to tell who is the pot and who is the kettle.
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"
The daily show
...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.
Are you claiming that news shows giving both sides of a story is a _bad_ thing?
Yes, if one of the sides is clearly false. Ignorance is not a point of view.
I'm not going to defend Fox News, but reading the questions they asked it's obvious this whole survey was designed in a way to create the answer they found. I couldn't find a single question where giving the right answer wasn't something that would look bad for a Republican and/or good for a Democrat or at the very least create some cognitive dissonance among Republican beliefs.
1. In these situations, Republicans aren't going to want to admit the truth even if they know it is true.
2. A conservative leaning news organization is less likely to have reported this news in the first place.
3. If they truly don't know the answer, Republicans will more likely pick an answer that would reflect well upon their beliefs and Democrats likewise.
If you reversed the questions and asked things where the correct answer reflects badly on Democrats, you would find very different results. Say if they were about Charles Rangel's ethics violations or Robert Byrd filibustering the Civil Rights Act. If every question were designed so that the truth reflected poorly on Democrats, I'm sure the result would have been that Fox News made for better informed listeners.
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
If "leftist news channels" were "equally biased" with Fox News, wouldn't they make you less informed? This study shows that MSNBC, arguably the most leftist of the cable news networks, has the best informed viewers.
There are two ways I can see to explain this result. If this effect is causative (the news channel you watch causes you to be better or worse informed), then we must conclude that MSNBC is more factual (since their viewers know more facts). This would disprove your claim of equal bias.
On the other hand this could just be correlational. That is people watch what they agree with, and it just happens that more informed people prefer left-biased news. This would mean that leftists are more informed, and the right wing is more ignorant.
I don't see any way to spin this in favor of either Fox News or conservatism.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
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.
If a left-leaning person is not even willing to hear from anyone labeled a conservative, I would posit that they are part of the problem as much as they harp on the right.
FC Closer
"Buy hospital insurance or... well there is no other choice."
OK, I've seen this Libertarian objection to the new Health Care law before, and I have a question about it. What do you consider the viable alternative? Before you answer, let me lay out the facts and assumptions that frame the question as I see it:
1) People get sick or injured. Often out of the blue, and occasionally seriously. The risk is lower for younger people, but even there it's not zero. I work with a guy who got cancer at 27. Thankfully he's insured. I knew a guy in college who had a stroke, again, thankfully insured. The older you get, the more likely and common these occurrence become. This a fact, i don't think there's any arguing it.
2) Our society will not countenance a system of "if you can't afford to pay for treatment or get insurance, you just die." As evidence for this fact I present a right wing invention: The Death Panel. We were told that if "Obamacare" passed our oldest and least able people would face the horrors of a "Death Panel" deciding who should and should not be treated. People were outraged, and it was the single most effective anti-healthcare argument out there. It was also complete bullshit, but hey. So again, our society will not actually tolerate a completely market driven Healthcare system. As soon as the old and infirm start dying for lack of care, something will have to change. This speaks well of our society, by the way. This is obviously an assumption, but I think you'd have a hard time countering it.
3) Care cost money. Particularity, the older and/or sicker you are, the more it costs. *Someone* has to pay for the care of those who can't pay for themselves, at least assuming that we accept my assumption "2" above. The options are: the patient (who obviously can't or they wouldn't be in this position), the Hospital (who will quickly go out of business in this model), or the Government (who usually wind up footing the bill one way or the other). Charities are an option, but they can only do so much. Unlike the government, they can't compel donations. This is a fact.
Given the three facts/assumptions above, what is the better option than compulsory health insurance? The current model is "People who can afford it, and want it, pay for insurance. Everyone else doesn't pay for insurance and either government insures them (medicare or medicaid), or when they do get sick they go to the hospital and build up phenomenal and unplayable debts that are eventually either forgiven by relief (bankruptcy) or just never paid." So either the hospital (through unpaid bills), the government (through Medicare/caid) or the patient (through insurance) pays for the care. This model has seen health care cost increase significantly faster than any other cost in modern life.
Forcing everyone to get insurance put people in the position of (mostly) paying for their own care, with the government chipping in to cover some of the bill for the poor. The end result is that people are getting care, they are primarily paying for it themselves, the government has a predictable expenditure structure, and hospitals always get paid. It's taking a choice away from you, true, you have to get insurance, but before when you had that choice you risked someone elves choices everyday. Because if you don't have insurance, and you get sick, someone is going to have to pay for it. And it probably won't be you.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I can accept that MSNBC and Fox News are equally biased, but I can not accept that they are equal.
Their methods, and quality, are not equal.
Even the hyper-partisans (Maddow, Olbermann) at MSNBC are generally fair with their treatment of the opposition. They base their arguments in facts, and they present their fluff stories as fluff, not serious news (War on Christmas? It's snowing so global warming is a myth? Seriously?)
Is MSNBC flawed? Hell yes. But it's not a brain dead mouthpiece for a political party like Fox News.
I would welcome intelligent discourse from the right. There ARE respectable ideas from the right. I don't agree with Ron Paul, but he's a thoughtful, intelligent individual. As is Condalisa Rice. David Frum has been called intellectual, and I'd say he deserves it. William F. Buckley certainly qualified.
But look at this list. There are certainly others you could add to it that I can't think of at the moment, but where are the leaders? Everyone who is on the right and shows the slightest hint of intellectualism is not taken seriously by the right wing base. Meanwhile, even if the inner circle doesn't take her seriously, Sarah Palin is in the spotlight of the populist base. That's a shame, and our republic is weaker for it.
No, I don't hate Fox News because it's right wing. There are plenty of things I don't agree with or don't like that I can just happily ignore.
The reason I detest Fox News, and the reason I can't just happily ignore it is because its not just anti-intellectual, but its gone so far as to be "proudly stupid", and because many of the tactics it employs are shady and dishonest.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Correlation != Causation. This is basic guys, cmon
You are right, of course. It's not that Fox News makes people stupid, it's that stupid people watch Fox News.
Except, that they don't talk about uninformed, they talk about misinformed
It's not that the viewers have no information, they have wrong information. And if people claim to get their information from that particular source it stands to reason, that there is causation. -At least on a statistically relevant level. Not for each individual of course. A smoker with lung cancer could also have spent half of his live in his parents radon filled basement..
And the things they were asked are facts. Someones birthplace, when a law got passed, who initiated it, or the nationality of the 9/11 hijackers are just plain facts.
No, this is not a liberal rant. It is a civility/democracy rant. Sadly, politics and journalism has sunken to the point, where anything goes and fact checking is replaced with the pseudo-objectivity of he-said she-said. Fox, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, etc. are despicable, but so was Air America on the left.
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.
What puts a bur up my butt is the assertion that Fox News is Libertarian when in fact it is 100% Authoritarian Statist Conservative. True libertarians are against the PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War, Medicaid Part D, the banned use of new stem cell lines, and are FOR abortion rights. Fox News does not qualify under any of these. I wish people would stop throwing the word "Libertarian" around so willy-nilly. The KKK used to use that word too, even though equal right is a fundamental tenant of Libertarianism. It gets used to mean "I'm against the things that I don't like, and the rest of the country is for the things I don't like, so I'm against them". Fuck that, I'm sick of this shit. Assholes like that ruined the idea of state's rights by hiding behind it any time they were told they can't systematically fuck people over just because they are different. Now we have a bunch of liberals who are Federalist Liberals because the states rights issue is now associated with those fuck wads. What those liberals don't seem to understand is that they can all move to the coasts, legalize pot, abortion, and put socialist principles into practice while the next state over is free to the exact opposite and we can all live in our separate worlds in peace and harmony. The same goes for these holier than thou Christian Theocrats. YOU CAN HAVE MISSISSIPPI ALL YOU WANT JUST DON'T LET IT AFFECT ME IN MY STATE OF CHOICE. God damn it this pisses me off.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
72 percent believe the economy is getting worse
While a quick google search shows this article-- By the very site claiming that "economy getting worse" is misinformation-- from august, stating that "the economy is getting worse"! Wow, just wow.
72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit
As opposed to a NY Times article stating that thats EXACTLY what will happen. So we're sitting here bashing on how bad Fox is, when an avid reader of the times could walk away with exactly the same impression? Sort of like how above someone could have read an alternet article about how the economy is sinking, only to be called stupid for doing so in an article 4 months later? Fantastic. Not to mention "healthcare reform bill reducing deficit" is speculation ANYWAY (you saying there will be NO differences from projected costs?), so its rather brash to call anyone who believes otherwise "misinformed".
60 percent believe climate change is not occurring
I would wonder A) how the question was worded (ie, "do you believe MAN has caused significant global warming" vs "do you believe the climate is changing"), and B) what the poll statistics were for other news networks, or the population in general. Sadly the link to the poll is down, if anyone managed to grab it I would be interested in seeing it.
In fact the big problem with the article is that its so biased its not even funny-- the headline puts the worst of slashdot's to shame. You've got flamebait, wild speculation, and assumptions of causation when only correlation is shown. The links to previous polls are hillarious-- we have one poll, by NBC, showing that NBC viewers are smarter (didnt we just get done laughing at poll by Microsoft showing that Microsoft's browser is the best?). And their conclusion, that I particularly liked:
The conclusion is inescapable. Fox News is deliberately misinforming its viewers and it is doing so for a reason.
Yes, that totally follows-- first, we're going to assume causation, and then we're going to assume intent, and then we're going to claim, whats more, that there is a reason behind all this, and finally that all of this is corroborated by the poll.
Excuse me, while I dont much like a lot of what I see on Fox, its a hell of a lot better than this sort of garbage (well, the news segments at least).
Commenters, if you dont much like Fox, thats great, but please note just how biased this story you're applauding is. Its practically a parody of itself.
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.