Updated Study Finds Fox News Viewers Least Informed Of All Viewers - I'm shocked, shocked I tell you

[Bozita]

Study Finds Fox News Viewers Least Informed Of All Viewers
Posted: 05/23/2012 8:32 am Updated: 05/23/2012 12:02 pm


Researchers at Farleigh Dickinson University updated a study they had conducted in late 2011. That study only sampled respondents from New Jersey, where the university is located. This time, the researchers conducted a nationwide poll.

-snip-

The pollsters found that people were usually able to answer 1.8 out of 4 questions on foreign news, and 1.6 of 5 questions on domestic news, and that people who don't watch any news were able to get 1.22 of the questions on domestic policy right.

As the study explained, though, people who watched only Fox News fared worse:

The largest effect is that of Fox News: all else being equal, someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer just 1.04 domestic questions correctly -- a figure which is significantly worse than if they had reported watching no media at all. On the other hand, if they listened only to NPR, they would be expected to answer 1.51 questions correctly; viewers of Sunday morning talk shows fare similarly well. And people watching only The Daily Show with Jon Stewart could answer about 1.42 questions correctly.

more...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/23/fox-news-less-informed-new-study_n_1538914.html

[polichick]

1. Doesn't count - the study was done by university researchers...

The snobs!

[drm604]

2. So watching Faux News is worse than watching no news at all.

So they're not simply uninformed, they're misinformed.

[blm]

3. Listen up - Moon and Murdoch were set up to be propaganda arms for GOP in the early 80s.

Iran-Contra's 'Lost Chapter'
By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
June 30, 2008
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/062908.html

As historians ponder George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, they may wonder how Republicans perfected a propaganda system that could fool tens of millions of Americans, intimidate Democrats, and transform the vaunted Washington press corps from watchdogs to lapdogs.

To understand this extraordinary development, historians might want to look back at the 1980s and examine the Iran-Contra scandal’s “lost chapter,” a narrative describing how Ronald Reagan’s administration brought CIA tactics to bear domestically to reshape the way Americans perceived the world.

That chapter – which we are publishing here for the first time – was “lost” because Republicans on the congressional Iran-Contra investigation waged a rear-guard fight that traded elimination of the chapter’s key findings for the votes of three moderate GOP senators, giving the final report a patina of bipartisanship.

Under that compromise, a few segments of the draft chapter were inserted in the final report’s Executive Summary and in another section on White House private fundraising, but the chapter’s conclusions and its detailed account of how the “perception management” operation worked ended up on the editing room floor.

The American people thus were spared the chapter’s troubling finding: that the Reagan administration had built a domestic covert propaganda apparatus managed by a CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist working out of the National Security Council.
“One of the CIA’s most senior covert action operators was sent to the NSC in 1983 by CIA Director [William] Casey where he participated in the creation of an inter-agency public diplomacy mechanism that included the use of seasoned intelligence specialists,” the chapter’s conclusion stated.

“This public/private network set out to accomplish what a covert CIA operation in a foreign country might attempt – to sway the media, the Congress, and American public opinion in the direction of the Reagan administration’s policies.”
However, with the chapter’s key findings deleted, the right-wing domestic propaganda operation not only survived the Iran-Contra fallout but thrived.

So did some of the administration’s collaborators, such as South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon and Australian press mogul Rupert Murdoch, two far-right media barons who poured billions of dollars into pro-Republican news outlets that continue to influence Washington’s political debates to this day.
>>>>>>>>

Robert Parry allows his work to be posted in full with proper credit, though I only posted a small excerpt here. There is so much more detail to share in the link above. For those of you unaware, it was Parry's investigative reporting that led to the wider investigation into Iran Contra.

[just1voice]

4. Good, anyone dumb enough to believe or who wants to believe Faux lies deserves it

Americans should be figuring out ways to get universal health care, get out of corrupt wars and ending criminal bank usury.

[SoutherDem]

5. But I thought Fox News was Fair and Balanced

This doesn't not surprise me. Fox is like the propaganda rags in the USSR and Nazi Germany. Telling only what their leaders wants to be told.

On the other hand, Yeah, NPR!

What is really unbelievable is that the FOX zombies feel NPR is liberal.

[LeftofObama]

6. I would be interested to see how I would do on the test.

I watch very little tv and get my news exclusively at DU and MSNBC.

Whenever I walk by the tv when someone has it on another channel and the news is on, 9 times out of 10 I've already heard about it on the good ole DU.

[pampango]

7. Here's a graphic. NPR viewers/listeners on top; FOX viewers on the bottom; below "no news"

t's a comparison of results on a basic factual-knowledge test for consumers of different news organizations. The Wire item (understandably) contrasted the results for Fox viewers versus those who watched no news at all. To me an even more dramatic contrast is Fox-v-NPR*.

To relate this to "false equivalence": during the Juan Williams inbroglio and passim, the Fox rationale has been that they are "balancing" a presumed bias from the rest of the media, notably NPR. Unt-uh! As I argued at the time, the more profound difference is that NPR aspires actually to be a news organization and to provide "information," versus fitting a stream of facts into the desired political narrative.

That contrast may lack surprise value at this point. Still, it's worth noting that anyone who attempts to equate, say, NPR and Fox, in the fashion of "they're all biased, you just pick your perspective," is once again not looking at the actual data.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/this-is-so-interesting-with-false-equivalence-implications/257612/