This…
In the study, 1,185 respondents nationwide were asked about what news sources they consumed in the past week and then were asked a variety of questions about current political and economic events in the U.S. and abroad. On average, people were able to answer correctly 1.8 of 4 questions about international news, and 1.6 of 5 questions about domestic affairs.
“Of course, knowledge of current events is predicted not just by watching news, but also by factors like ideology, education, age and gender,” said Dan Cassino, political scientist and poll analyst. “Based on these results, people who don’t watch any news at all are expected to answer correctly on average 1.22 of the questions about domestic politics, just by guessing or relying on existing basic knowledge.”
However, the study concludes that media sources have a significant impact on the number of questions that people were able to answer correctly. 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.
…is directly attributable to watching garbage like this on a daily basis.
It’s so painfully stupid, one can almost hear brain cells frying and dying at every syllable spoken by this cast of clowns. As Ben Adler over at The Nation points out, Fox and its pundits are not deserving of anyone’s respect and it has nothing to do with their conservative views. It’s because they fail “the fundamental test of journalism: are you informing your audience?”
The answer is a clear and resounding NO.
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Oh….. goody… this is dead-on!!!
I believe that fox news and right wing raidio has done more to dumb down America then defunding public education has but citizens united has crashed and burned our democracy.
Why wasn’t Fox “News” this worked up about Bush allegedly abandoning his National Guard duties? They say they’re “fair and balanced.”
Unfortunately I have relatives that watch this crap as their exclusive news source. I have tried, year after year, without success, to convince them to at least look at CNN. But no, they know what they want to hear, and where they can hear it.
Sad. And depressing.
I’m sorry, but I can never finish watching anything that spews out of the mouth of Fox News – I tried but I never could get to the end of their idiotic babbling on about Obama’s birth certificate. No other president has had their birth certificate scrutinized and intentionally looking for some kind of flaw to prove it’s false.
To actually think they have the ignorance to think that the State of Hawaii, the hospital Obama was born in, a major trusted newspaper all conspired almost a half century ago to set into motion making a small baby who wasn’t actually a citizen of the U.S. become the president.
I think that this crowd actually believes that Obama must me the anti-Christ and his presidency is the beginning of the reign of the beast. They should know that if that was true – and Obama is the actual anti-Christ there would be nothing in the world they could do about it. It’s prophecy which WILL take place and they should concern themselves with things more beneficial, like reading a newspaper sometime or flip the channel away from Fox and onto a more reliable source of news.
The same study showed that people who listened to NPR were the best-informed and that viewers of The Daily Show came in second.
I think almost everyone gets it wrong about The Daily Show. It’s not that its viewers watch the show to get the news. It’s that watching it is not entertaining unless you are already well informed. After all, humor and satire about current events and politics would just go over your head if you didn’t have the context. What would you get, for example, out of a piece ridiculing the Republican primary debates if you had no idea what when on at the debates?
By the same token, all the late-night talk show monologues would fall flat if the audience had no idea what the jokes were about.
At alternet.com site a poster wrote about a retired professor of psychology from the university of Manitoba.
Robert Altemeyer has studied and written extensively about right wing authoritarianism. He wrote it in 2006, I believe and as a public service he has made it available for free on his website. It explains the thought process of these wing nuts and it is quite enlightening and frightening.
http://Www.theauthoritarians.com