Study Finds Fox News Viewers Least Informed Of All Viewers!

[Nemo]

Lamb....

[Humongous]

obama watched those men die on Drone TV, doing his best impression of a wallflower, because he is a despicable coward

There was no live video feed. Just audio. Video was obtained 20 days later from security cameras. The whole "Obama watched in real time" stuff is false. Snopes debunked it. The CIA also never told anyone to stand down.

[Humongous]

Still a tragedy nonetheless.

[Nemo]

There was no live video feed. Just audio. Video was obtained 20 days later from security cameras. The whole "Obama watched in real time" stuff is false. Snopes debunked it. The CIA also never told anyone to stand down.

Obama lied.
Benghazi was never about a YouTube video inciting a spontaneous mob!

[Anyonenow]

There have actually been a multitude of studies about Fox News and the effect it has on its viewers knowledge on everything from the Iraq war to global climate change. The University of Maryland did one, a Stanford political scientist did one, American University, Ohio State etc. There's a decent summary of the studies here. http://www.alternet.org/story/154875...med?page=0%2C0
For the most part, I think the news media in the U.S is too ratings-driven and there is too much opinion and punditry instead of just facts.

Great article.
many more studies confirming what has already posted.

[openmike11]

CNN ratings suck because they suck as a news organization. People have caught on and don't watch anymore. CNN is geared to black people.

Fuck these polls, mean nothing and are never accurate.

[Rogue]

I have a question for you right wing nuts that worship Fox News. What would have to happen for you to believe something contrary, to think that Fox was lying to you or that republicans are wrong about something? What evidence would you need?

(For the rest of us, as sad as it is, it's useless talking to them. Any evidence to the contrary of the Fox News party line is instantly dismissed as a liberal plot. They are disturbingly brainwashed.)

And before you go and try and just turn around my question, it wouldn't take much for most liberals to believe negative crap about their side. BTW, I used to watch Fox News and believed what they said. I just listened to other sources as well. At some point you have to wonder why they don't agree, do some research, and figure out who's lying to you. But go back to being lazy, flag waving, fools. Carry on.

[username]

"Fox News hit out at the school responsible for the study on Thursday. A spokesperson for the network

told The Hollywood Reporter

, "Considering FDU’s undergraduate school is ranked as one of the worst in the country, we suggest the school invest in improving its weak academic program instead of spending money on frivolous polling – their student body does not deserve to be so ill-informed."

There are many studies out there.
Niggers have an average IQ of 70. Atheists have on average 5 more points that non-atheist. Apple uses have higher IQ and earns on average 30% more then non Apple uses.

Adolf Hitler had the most successful society of all time. 13% tax. No unemployment. No crime. 95% of people voted for Adolf in open elections. Adolf have the highest approval rating of all time. Time man of the year. 2% of "germans" didn't like Adolf.
Should the society take care of 95% of the population or the 2% ?

[shitba]

Based on the questions they high-lighted in the press release (the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and the current war in Syria), it's not clear to me how anyone who claims to watch a news station regularly could be ignorant of the basic facts in each case. How do they know that their test subjects actually watch the news on a regular basis?

[SouthernListen]

My conclusions from the article below:
1. Not nearly enough questions for a valid study.
2. People who only watch TV for news are not that well informed.
3. The more highly partisan the news source, the less informative.
4. The OP and others crowed about Fox's poor showing but declined to mention MSNBC's similarly bad showing. Basically, extreme partisans of both sides are often misinformed because they hear only what they want to hear.
5. While certain less stringently biased sources may also slant news, they also manage to accurately cover basic facts. The bias is not in the facts, but in the analysis and how it is presented. The study does not cover this. These organizations are far more subtle than Fox and MSNBC.
7. Fox and MSNBC's largest rated shows by far are their opinion shows. It's not surprising that people who tune in for "news" to shows where screaming matches go on won't learn much.
8. The question mentioned was vague, but it also brings up the point that the other questions must have been pretty basic as well. I seriously doubt even the extreme news organizations fail to inform people of things like the fact that Mubarak was overthrown. This confirms the fact that most viewers probably watch the prime time screaming matches and not the news segments.





Also at the Huff Post, from the authors of the original study:

Fox News Does Not Make You Dumb: Researchers Respond to Critics





Does Fox News make you dumb? No, but that was the headline generated by news aggregators re-reporting research by Fairleigh Dickinson University's PublicMind.


The initial study found that the least informative media were two partisan cable news channels, Fox and MSNBC, which came out at the bottom of twelve sources tested. NPR and Jon Stewart's Daily Show came out on top as the most informative, making the schadenfreude all the more delicious for Fox-haters, and the twisting of the liberal knife-in-the-back all the more painful for Fox fans. But how did it come to that?
Respondents were asked to identify which, if any, news sources they had used in the past week. The same respondents were questioned about current political and economic events. Some questions were deliberately easy; others were hard. The study then looked at the relation between which news sources people used, and how well they could answer the questions. In modified geek-speak, the idea was to isolate the effects of individual news sources on the ability to answer questions about current events, controlling for all of the other news sources, as well as things that tend to predict political knowledge, such as partisanship, age and education.
Overall, Fox viewers were not better or worse than the average respondent at answering the questions. That said, and all salient variables being geekily controlled for, there was not merely a zero effect but a negative effect of Fox News on viewers' ability to answer the questions; meaning that Fox viewers would have done better had they been using almost any other news source, or no news source at all. Results for the similarly partisan MSNBC were... well, similar.
The big surprise was that news reports focused almost exclusively on Fox's last place showing, and that the reports went viral. Then the unexpected bonus was the number of Fox-defenders who sent emails and snail mails, left voice messages, and blogged intensely, making every sort of criticism, especially argumentum ad hominem. As a matter of course, the investigators had a variety of mental, moral, and physical deformities. The most predictable of these was that the researchers, being college professors, were by definition mindless, meming, bed-wetting liberals, who drew their conclusions first, and arranged the data accordingly, or gleefully over-interpreted the results to gratify their prejudices.
The most substantive critique was that some questions were ambiguous, and therefore skewed the results. Critics pointed to one question in particular which asked whether the Egyptian people had been successful in "bringing down their regime." Alert readers suggested that while Egyptians were successful in forcing President Mubarak from power, one could not definitively say that they had overthrown the regime, since the same military which secured Mubarak for many decades continued to run the country, and the same protesters who were fed up with Mubarak's rule continued to agitate for the military to relinquish its control.
The perspicacity of this observation was matched only by the peculiar number of people who made the argument, frequently in identical language. Still, the answer is that an ambiguous question answer should have an equivalent effect on many different kinds of media consumers. Bias arising from poor question construction should not be systematic, but random. Fox-defenders were unintentionally positing that the effects of ambiguous language, or an arbitrary correct answer category, would affect Fox viewers disproportionately to all other media consumers.
One can suppose that this is within the realm of possibility if Fox viewers were systematically being presented with, and paying attention to, more news about the Egyptian Spring than other citizens, and were more thoughtful about it, and thus more likely than others to all draw similar conclusions. As one enthusiast put it, "Fox viewers got it right, and you got it wrong. My advice is to leave international affairs to someone else, or start watching Fox."
But were this alternative hypothesis true, it should have applied uniquely to scores for the poorly constructed question. In fact, a "wrong" answer to the Egyptian question correlated strongly to "wrong" answers on the all the other questions.
Critics also made points about the size and scope of the sampled population; some suggested that because it was done in New Jersey the results could not be imputed to other states, much less to the entire nation. New Jersey is, after all, demographically different from many other states. It leans to the Democratic Party. More than one in four speak a language other than English at home. And it has an elevated percentage of people with graduate education.
Other critics suggested too few people were included in the study and too few questions employed. The study used five questions, primarily because space on the omnibus questionnaire was limited. The same poll included voter assessments of the president and of New Jersey's governor, as well as a series supported by the New Jersey Farm Bureau, an annual sponsor of the poll.
The answer to all these criticisms was to run the experiment again, this time using a national sample, increasing the number of questions, and doubling the number of interviews. A new, national study thus included eight questions; four domestic and four international. The N increased from 612 to 1185, though it must be said that this was not at all a matter, as some critics thought, of having enough cases in certain cells to compare them using conventional tests to pronounce their differences significant. It was never a matter of examining crosstabs.
What the researchers searched for were the marginal effects of exposure to one news medium compared to any other. Their figures represented expected, not observed, values and all were relative to a hypothetical construct of someone who had no recent news exposure. Of course, most people get news from multiple sources, but the effect of each source, or of no source, can be calculated using multinomial logistic regression. All results controlled for partisanship, age, education, and gender, so that conclusions were presented ceteris paribus.
The re-study produced the same result as the original, but attracted few headlines. The news aggregators had already had their fun.
Fox came out on the bottom, even below "no news exposure." NPR came out on top, along with The Daily Show. Responses to the question about Egypt, now rephrased to specifically name Mubarak, were no different. We concluded again that NPR is one of the "most informative news outlets," while "exposure to partisan sources, such as Fox and MSNBC, has a negative impact." But perhaps that latter phase was misleading.
We never said, nor meant to say, that Fox viewers are dumb -- or MSNBC viewers for that matter. They're no better or worse than the average respondents. Clearly, anyone who is dumb and watching TV was dumb when he or she sat down in front of the tube. Some news sources just don't help matters any.

[Anyonenow]

My conclusions from the article below:
Blah blah blah.

Thank you for your post.

At the very bottom you link to the RE-Study(LINK) which was completed in 2012 which CONFIRMS the original study.

People learn most from NPR, Sunday Morning Shows, ‘The Daily Show’
According to a follow-up survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMindTM, NPR and Sunday morning political talk shows are the most informative news outlets, while exposure to partisan sources, such as Fox News and MSNBC, has a negative impact on people’s current events knowledge. This nationwide survey confirms initial findings presented in a New Jersey focused poll (from November of 2011).

[shitba]

Thank you for your post.

At the very bottom you link to the RE-Study(LINK) which was completed in 2012 which CONFIRMS the original study.

People learn most from NPR, Sunday Morning Shows, ‘The Daily Show’
According to a follow-up survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMindTM, NPR and Sunday morning political talk shows are the most informative news outlets, while exposure to partisan sources, such as Fox News and MSNBC, has a negative impact on people’s current events knowledge. This nationwide survey confirms initial findings presented in a New Jersey focused poll (from November of 2011).

I would be very curious to learn how it is that they determined that people watch a given news channel. People lie about things like that so that they don't look like dummies. Someone who tunes into FOX or MSNBC once every two months might claim that it's a three-time weekly habit. Both FOX and MSNBC are adequate sources for the sample questions that they included in the article. Just basic stuff...they all cover it.

[Anyonenow]

I would be very curious to learn how it is that they determined that people watch a given news channel. People lie about things like that so that they don't look like dummies. Someone who tunes into FOX or MSNBC once every two months might claim that it's a three-time weekly habit. Both FOX and MSNBC are adequate sources for the sample questions that they included in the article. Just basic stuff...they all cover it.

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.

[shitba]

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.

Yeah, that's what I figured. Thanks!