The study you dummies are touting is itself a piece of misinformation.
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The survey I posted was one that showed Republicans and independents were better informed than Democrats.
For Fox News viewers to really be "misinformed" there viewers would need to be predominantly Democrats.
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Here's a good look at your fake "misinformed" study:
About That Study of Misinformation and Fox News
[Verumserum does a great analysis of what's wrong with that agitprop against Fox News the Soros/Tides created. ]
John on December 18, 2010 at 5:17 pm
The left is twitterpated over a new survey which claims that regular Fox viewers were misinformed about a number of issues related to the 2010 elections:
they found that regular viewers of the Fox News Channel, which tilts to the right in prime time, were significantly more likely to believe untruths about the Democratic health care overhaul, climate change and other subjects.
I’ve read the report and what it shows is significantly less impressive than what the summary claims it does. While it does show some misinformation on questions about Obama’s birth certificate and whether or not taxes were raised or lowered, the survey does nothing to demonstrate that Fox has promoted the false answers. In this case, as in others, correlation is not causation. In the case of Obama’s birth certificate, I’m certain that issue has been dismissed by Fox hosts.
But there are also a number of cases in the report where the numbers don’t really demonstrate what the authors claim they do. For instance, on the topic of “saved or created jobs” here is the key chart (click for full size):
Numbers in the left hand column represent people who never watch that media source while numbers in the right hand column represent die hard viewers of a particular media outlet. Looking at this chart what we find is that of people who never read newspapers (print or online) 86% agreed with this proposition which the authors of the study note is wrong according to the CBO. Of those who never watch network TV news, 92% agreed with this. In fact, if you take an average of the “Never” column you find that somewhere north of 86% believed this and those numbers stay consistent all the way through the “Rarely”, “About once a week” up to the “Almost every day” columns.
In fact, there is almost no difference between daily Fox watchers and daily NPR/PBS watchers on this question (91 to 87%). So the New York Times and the usual suspects are trumpeting the fact that daily Fox viewers were 4% more misinformed than NPR/PBS viewers and 1% more misinformed than daily Network News viewers. Is this really worth mentioning?
There is really only one outlier in this chart and that’s the people who watch MSNBC daily. Only 2/3 of them agreed with this statement, but that is still 20-25% less than any other outlet. Clearly there was one network that was heavily invested in “jobs created or saved.” There are many people who believe a “saved” job is something of a mythical creature, there being no way to know what would have happened without the stimulus. But that aside, Fox was no different than all the other outlets, save the one aligned most closely with the administration pushing this idea.
Let’s look at another example related to TARP (click for full size):
Again, notice that the difference between networks is fairly slight. In fact, daily Fox viewers did better on this issue than daily Network TV News viewers. But as the report itself indicates, this is a bit of a trick question:
TARP was passed in Congress with considerable bipartisan support. Majorities of Democrats in both houses favored it. Republicans were divided overall: a large majority of Republicans favored it in the Senate, and while House Republicans leaned negative, this was by a narrow margin. A majority of voters were correct about Democratic support for TARP, but views were mixed on how the Republicans voted.
So while it’s technically true that Republicans were evenly split on the issue if you combine the House and Senate, the House vote took place after the Senate had already passed TARP. That means the House is where the bill’s fate was ultimately decided. And in the House, a majority of Republicans did oppose it. In fact, in the first vote held in late September, only 65 House Republicans voted for it and 133 voted no. The original bill failed. The vote which eventually passed the bill still got a minority of House Republicans. In other words, there was indeed a move by Republicans to defeat the bill. In fact, Republicans came back again in January to try to shut down the second half of the TARP spending.
Did Republicans oppose TARP? Yes. Did Republican opposition lead to a defeat of the bill? Yes. Did most Republicans in the House oppose even the version that passed? Yes. Did most Republicans overall oppose it if you only look at the final votes in the Senate and House combined? Well, no, they were evenly split overall once you cherry pick the vote and add in the Senate.
Now look at the question they asked again “When TARP came up for a vote, most Republicans opposed it.” I’d say that’s arguably true. They did oppose it by 2-1, which is why a second vote had to be taken. Let’s just say that whether this truly counts as “misinformation” is not as clear to me as it is to the authors of the report.
Another example (click for full size):
Remember these are supposed to be examples of Fox viewers being significantly misinformed about issues. As we’ve seen in the two previous examples, the data is arguable. In this case, however, we do however see a big split between daily Fox viewers and, say, daily NPR/PBS viewers. However, let’s go back to the question:
As you know, the American economy had a major downturn starting in the fall of 2008. Do you think that now the economy is a) starting to recover or b) still getting worse?
According to the study’s authors, the correct answer is b, because “The Bureau of Economic Analysis at the Department of Commerce says that the US economy began to recover from recession in the third quarter of 2009 and has continued to grow since then.” But notice that the question did not mention the word “recession.” More importantly, it did not ask respondents whether what the Department of Commerce thought about the matter. It asked what they thought. In other words, this is an opinion question and as such is not subject to fact-checking. If the authors intended to ask a factual question about the technical end of the recession, they should have been more precise.
What the response to this question shows is that Fox viewers are significantly more pessimistic about the economy than viewers of other networks. But pessimism is not the same thing as misinformation. Given the recent bump in the unemployment rate and corresponding statements that unemployment will likely remain high for 3-4 more years, I think Fox viewers may be on to something.
One more? How about health care?
In this case, the question is phrased more carefully. It asks what “economists who have estimated the effect of health reform” think about what it will do to the budget. Most of the answers come in at around 45% saying it will increase the deficit. Only daily Fox viewers really stand out from the pack. So what do economists think? Well, the survey’s authors give us just two examples, the CBS and the Medicare trustees. Both say the bill will reduce the deficit, therefore the authors count this as the right answer.
But the truth is a bit more complicated. Last year, CBO director Douglas Elmdorf testified on Capitol Hill that ObamaCare would bend the cost curve upward and likely increase deficits. Even if you believe that opinion was superseded by later CBO reports, the fact remains that the cost containment was dishonest in a number of ways. Most significantly, the projected savings over 10 years only works if you assume that no further “doc fix” will be passed (as it already has been). Had the doc fix been included in the bill, it would move the numbers by nearly $400 billion over the decade. That means that instead of shaving $100 billion off the deficit, the bill with the doc fix would add as much as $200 billion.
By keeping this expense separate, Democrats in Congress were able to get a report out of the CBO saying ObamaCare would save money. But the honestly of this approach was repeatedly questioned at the time, and not just by Fox. Indeed it was mostly staunch defenders of the bill that vouched for a separate doc fix. Fox News guests openly questioned this approach. I know because Media Matters complained about them doing so.
The survey’s authors are playing the Democrats game when they claim Fox viewers have this wrong. In truth, Democrats passed and Obama signed a one year doc fix just this month. Unless the doc fix is abandoned in future years (it won’t be) Fox viewers will be right about what is really happening with ObamaCare and the deficit and viewers of other outlets will prove to be the ones who were misinformed.
I’ve given four examples of serious problems with this survey from badly phrased questions to questionable analysis of facts and “right” answers which are undercut by anything but the most superficial analysis. There are more problems, but this should suffice to demonstrate that this survey is of little value beyond the reassurance it will no doubt provide to liberal bloggers and viewers of MSNBC.
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