I rememmber seeing a poll somewhere that a larger number of Fox News viewers believed that some of the 911 hijackers were from Iraq than people who got their news from other news sources.
Are there any other polls or research done that show how well informed Fox News viewers are or are not?
Given the number of posts which begin…
“I never watch Fox news, but the other day I was flipping around the channels and I saw Sean Hannity…”
I would assume the “average intelligence” matches that of the SDMB. 
Let’s put it this way, those people who watch FOX actually believe it is “fair and balanced.” How much less informed can you be?
How do we know they actually believe that?
I can offer one data point. My brother, when he switched cable systems, found that he had lost Fox News. He actually said to us that he was very disappointed because it was the most fair and balanced news channel.
Cite?
Every news source is biased.
Cite?
I would offer that “news” by its very nature is biased in that somebody else thought it was important enough to repeat. Once you add on what that person thought or felt about the raw facts, you have another level of bias.
Fair and balanced news would be Total Silence.
Cite?
As a wise man once said, the problem ain’t what they don’t know, it’s what they know that ain’t so.
Great, thanks this is great info.
See post No. 8, this thread.
But not all news sources are equally fair and balanced. CNN comes way closer to that unreachable ideal than Fox.
Well if you ever watch much Fox News, you’ll see that it’s not very big on details and small facts. They will, however present numbers though, but only for the effect of impact, not for any kind of calculations. “We spend 100 TRILLION a year on crack mammas’ healthcare!”
And you certainly won’t get much details into the nationality of the 911 hijackers. They like to subtly play to the group that thinks that the ME should be turned into a glass parking lot. By linking 9/11 with the war in Iraq, they pretty much brainwashed those who wanted to believe that Iraq was responsible.
There MUST have been a connection! Iraq is an easily invaded flat country with a mean president who wants us all dead! What could go wrong?
I haven’t looked through the study myself. Can someone tell me whether they actually showed that watching Fox caused ignorance? An alternative hypothesis is that the people watching Fox just wouldn’t watch much news at all if Fox weren’t available, so they would be even more ignorant without it. Perhaps Fox targets an audience that starts out with a great deal of ignorance. If that is the case, then even if Fox were the best at presenting the facts, their audience might still be more ignorant than other networks’ audiences. Conceivably, Fox’s audience might be less ignorant than it was before it started watching Fox, but it has so much catching up to do that it is still more ignorant than other audiences.
But the point of the study is that they have misperceptions. Humans may be born in a state of ignorance, but you’re not born believing that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. At some point people must have been told or at least picked up on the implication that these “facts” were true.
I like this hypothesis. It reminds me of a guy I worked with who had the distinct ability to walk into a room and after a few comments or observations he would make, the actual total intelligence of the room would drop. He imparted such confusion and misinformation that almost everybody else would begin doubting what they thought they knew before. And of course, this guy would leave in a less-well-informed condition after anybody attempted to refute or to clarify whatever it was he had said. His name was Rose, and we dubbed that as an acronym for Retro-Obfuscating Stultification Effect.
Many of you are operating on the assumptions that
(a) People who watch Fox News don’t have the same ideology that you do and since (b) people who don’t belive as you do are ignorant, therefore © Fox viewers are ignorant.
The question also goes to the idea of media bias, which some of you would rather die than admit exists on the left side of the spectrum. You see it everywhere on Fox, but you think media outlets like the New York Times or the network newscasts are the pinnacle of objective journalism.
I consider myself well informed. I am also a ten year veteran of the TV news business. I see examples of rightward bias on Fox and I see leftward bias by the truckload in the mainstream media.
Many of you are burning up the keyboard right now demanding examples. Let me attempt to do that. First of all, I don’t believe there is a vast conspiracy of Mao-quoting socialists looking up from their little red books just long enough to put a newscast together before going back to the anti-nuclear power rally.
Here is where is does come in. It begins with story selection. For every story that makes a newscast there are ten that do not. Producers who are responsible for “stacking a show” will choose stories based on various factors including timeliness, interest level, importance, historical context and a number of other factors. The idea is to create a product that will keep people watching, not to indoctrinate. The problem is when you have an entire group of people who believe in many of the tenets of leftward thought as “just the way things are”. Since pro-life people are crazy religious nuts, we will choose a story that portrays them in that manner, such as people screaming outside an abortion clinic. Since Republican economic policy favors the rich, positive economic news is ignored or met with a “yeah, but”, as in unemployment is down two tenths of a percent, but we’ll talk to a guy in Pennsylvania that is “still suffering”.
The other issue is presentation. Pay attention to the questions that are asked and the way they are framed. Listen to the writing carefully and see where it leads you.
The more well-informed you are, the easier it is to recognize this when it happens…unless you are incapable of looking past ideological filters.
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Lou Dobbs has pretty much ruined CNN’s credibility. MSNBC is much better at actually being fair and balanced in the news reporting business.