Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Does Fox News rot the brain?

FoxNews.com - The Truth About Fox News Viewers


Does watching Fox News rot your brain? According to a report released last month by WorldPublicOpinion.org at the University of Maryland, "Misinformation and the 2010 Election," the more people watch Fox News, the more they are "misinformed."

The allegation rapidly became a favorite topic for leading mainstream news outlets including The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, CBS News, Slate, The Atlantic. Even major newspapers in Canada and the U.K.covered the report. Of course, left-wing websites -- the Talking Point Memo, Media Matters, and the Daily Kos -- reveled in the findings.

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Still other questions were fraught with problems. For instance, "Since January 2009 have your Federal income taxes gone down, stayed the same, or gone up?" That was not a smart formulation when the researchers intended an answer for overall tax rates rather than for each individual's taxes. And then there are problems with their question about the TARP financial bailout, where the researchers ask about whether most Congressional Republicans supported it. But they can't even add up the total votes in the House or Senate on the bill which shows that Republicans were literally split 50-50, while 75 percent of Democrats supported it. On their own, House Republicans would never have supported the bill.

The WorldPublicOpinion.org survey is a mess. At best, the survey shows that liberals who conducted the survey simply were not smart or careful enough. If any conclusion can be drawn, it is that those who watched Fox News almost every day had not fallen for left-wing myths to the same extent as other Americans.

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