Study Confirms That Fox News Makes You Stupid

[The_Bith_Shuffle]

@septimus

Peeta Mellark wrote, in response to my post about controlled studies “Roderick Femm was not arguing that the correlation doesn’t exist. Only pointing out that correlation does not equal causation. It hasn’t been proven that Fox News viewers are “made” stupid by watching Fox News. They might be that way to start with.”

Stupidity and education are not antonyms; nevertheless my impression is that Peeta Mellark missed the point about controlling for educational level.

Causality is hard to prove with 100% confidence. We might imagine a gene which causes even educated people to have stupid political ideas, and which also causes them to watch FoxNews. However, one builds controls into experiments to increase one’s confidence in possible causal relationships.

Fotheringay-Phipps wrote “You get this kind of result by testing a right wing viewership for right wing oriented falsehoods…”

Again, do you disagree that he is ignoring studies which controlled for political alignment? (Mr. Phipps may not be “at fault”, as OP’s study lacked such control. I prefer to deflect attention to more meaningful studies.)

My Google-fu is poor. Here’s the first link Google showed me; I seem to recall seeing even better studies.

I agree that controls can help pin down causation in many cases, but I do not think they do in this case. There is variation in intelligence in any given group (except a group defined by its level of intelligence), and right-wingers are no different. Why not suppose that dumber right-wingers are more apt to watch Fox news?

Maybe there’s some nuance to the debate I’m still not catching on to.

[septimus]

@The_Bith_Shuffle

There is variation in intelligence in any given group (except a group defined by its level of intelligence), and right-wingers are no different.

For convenience, it is common to use educational level as a proxy for intelligence. Are you hypothesizing that among right-wingers of the same education level, the stupider ones are the ones more likely to watch Fox? You might well be right; I just want you to be clear that your comments imply such.

[Fotheringay-Phipps]

@septimus

Fotheringay-Phipps wrote “You get this kind of result by testing a right wing viewership for right wing oriented falsehoods…”

Again, do you disagree that he is ignoring studies which controlled for political alignment? (Mr. Phipps may not be “at fault”, as OP’s study lacked such control. I prefer to deflect attention to more meaningful studies.)

If you want to do that, you’ve got to cite them.

My Google-fu is poor. Here’s the first link Google showed me; I seem to recall seeing even better studies.

The same general point still applies. Rumors about the mosque are a right wing issue, and you’ll naturally be exposed to more of them on a right wing outlet. Even if you control for political alignment of the people being tested (& I frankly don’t have a whole lot of confidence that this was accurately done) you’re not controlling for the fact that they were measuring only a right wing myth and not a left wing one.

Test for rumors that the 9/11 attacks were a CIA/Mossad conspiracy and you’ll see that Fox News viewers had heard of and believed fewer of them than MSNBC viewers, and for the same reason.

[Peeta_Mellark]

@septimus

Do you understand “controlled for education and even political alignment”?

I was not commenting on that. I was pointing out that what **Roderick Femm **was talking about was correlation versus causation. If people are of low intelligence or ignorant and are watching Fox News, that does not prove Fox News is the cause. Controlling for education and political alignment has nothing to do with it, as that isn’t related to isolating Fox News as an initial cause of ignorance.

[puddleglum]

If you go to the website I linked to before there are some interesting results if you take education as a proxy for intelligence. Take percentage of people in the high knowledge group and subtract percentage of people completing college. The results are News Hour with Jim Lehrer 21, Bill O’Reilly show 27. NPR 11, Rush Limbaugh 14. CNN 11, FNC 13.
It appears from these crude metrics that conservative media does a better job educating people about news than liberal media outlets do.