[Vision2020] No News is Better than Fox News

[Nicholas Gier]

Fox News viewers are less informed than people who don't watch any news,
according to a new poll from Fairleigh Dickinson
University<http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/>.


The poll surveyed New Jersey residents about the uprisings in Egypt and the
Middle East, and where they get their news sources. The study, which
controlled for demographic factors like education and partisanship, found
that "people who watch Fox News are 18-points less likely to know that
Egyptians overthrew their government" and "6-points less likely to know
that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government" compared to those
who watch no news.

Overall, 53% of all respondents knew that Egyptians successfully overthrew
Hosni Mubarak and 48% knew that Syrians have yet to overthrow their
government.

Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson,
explained in a statement, "Because of the controls for partisanship, we
know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being
more likely to watch Fox News. Rather, the results show us that there is
something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these
questions than those who don’t watch any news at all."

This isn't the first study that has found that Fox News viewers more
misinformed in comparison to others. Last year, a study from the University
of Maryland<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/17/fox-news-viewers-are-the-_n_798146.html>found
that Fox News viewers were more likely to believe false information
about politics.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20111122/2a267888/attachment.html>