Monday, April 10, 2006
Fox News: Fair and Balanced.
Studies have shown that if you watch Fox News you are more likely than those who watch NPR to get basic information WRONG.If you are a regular Fox News Watcher, you are more likely than those who don't to be able to answer questions about current events.
"Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War," the most recent study was released in early October by the Program on International Policy Attitudes of the Center on Policy Attitudes and the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland (UM).
To quote the UM study: "Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions. Those who receive most of their news from NPR and PBS are less likely to have misperceptions."
In fact, Fox News watchers were three times more likely to hold three key misperceptions than those watching the next most watched network. In the NPR-PBS audience, an overwhelming majority had none of the three misperceptions. If one looks at each of the categories, the differences are dramatic. Sixty-seven percent of Fox viewers had a wrong perception about links between Iraq and al-Qaeda (16 percent for the PBS-NPR audience). On the existence of weapons of mass destruction, 33 percent of Fox viewers had the wrong perception (11 percent for PBS-NPR). On world opinion, 35 percent of Fox viewers had misperceptions (5 percent of PBS-NPR viewers). In all three cases, the misperception percentages decreased when moving from Fox to CBS to NBC to CNN to ABC, to print media, to PBS-NPR.
Just for the Record: Liberals are twice as likely as the national average (33% vs. 16%) to regularly listen to NPR. Similarly, 41% of conservatives regularly watch Fox News Channel, compared with 25% of the public.
Now I must ask you, gentle reader, if FOX News has so MISINFORMED its viewers on the state of the world and the Iraq War, you wonder if maybe they do it for other issues as well.
Take the above picture. If you are educated you know that illegal immigrants are INELIGIBLE for welfare. In addition you know that 90% of them are working. So what could possibly be the reason Fox News is describing them as "Freeloading" and linking it to cutting Welfare?
I smell an agenda. Someone call George Orwell.
# posted by The Punisher @ Monday, April 10, 2006 
