1/05/2011

My newest Fox News piece: "The Truth About Fox News Viewers"

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

Does watching Fox News rot your brain? According to a report released last month by WorldPublicOpinion.org at the University of Maryland, "Misinformation and the 2010 Election," the more people watch Fox News, the more they are "misinformed."

The allegation rapidly became a favorite topic for leading mainstream news outlets including The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, CBS News, Slate, The Atlantic. Even major newspapers in Canada and the U.K.covered the report. Of course, left-wing websites -- the Talking Point Memo, Media Matters, and the Daily Kos -- reveled in the findings.
The report asserted that Fox News viewers getting political survey questions wrong was not just the result of already wrongheaded Republicans watching 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."

But the researchers themselves were clearly misinformed and frequently picked incorrect or left-wing biased answers as the "correct" ones, something the uncritical mainstream media apparently never examined. Take the first four questions of the eleven the report focused on. . . .


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