Some News Leaves People Knowing Less

"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."

http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/

 

Fox lies.

 

People who watch Fox News believe everything they hear - must be why advertisers love buying airtime there.

 

Pepper spray, it's what's for dinner!

 

Palin public appearances will do that to you.

 

Such utter b_llsh_t – that study, this (sure to be soon locked) thread.

Rabble on, though.

(And, just to note, I rarely if ever watch Fox. I don't need somebody on TV or radio to tell me what the news is. But it can't be any worse than the garbage that often passes for news on CNN or NPR.)

 

FOX LIES.

 

I've watched FOX recently. I hardly see any news. It's designed to piss people off, get them outraged, and to keep them coming back for more.

Sure, I probably don't want a kindergarten teacher handing out condoms to kids (if this even happened), but I don't see why it's leading a national news network, or how it effects me when it's 3,000 miles away. That Egypt thing? Who gives a fuck, I guess.

 

If you really think someone would be as informed (or not) if they watched Fox or listened to NPR, then you really shouldn't be in the news business.

 

In large part, Faux News largely attempts to teach people how to be stupid, smoke Koch, and strive against their best interests.

The truly scary part is that it's worked to the degree it has.

 

I don't watch the news to be informed; I watch it to have my beliefs validated and the people and things I disagree with ridiculed.

 

I chose not to go into journalism, and this is in part why: Too many journalists are not very smart.

Let's look at some methodological flaws in the poll:

1. It's only sampling New Jersey voters, not national voters, so to extrapolate to the entire country would be problematic.

2. "Oh, but Franklin Lincoln, this was a sample of 612 people, which should mean the margin of error is less than four percent!" No, when considering Fox News viewers, this was a sample of 64% of 612 people -- less than 400 people, meaning the margin of error is probably in the neighborhood of 6-7 percent. Furthermore, the percentages for NPR and the Daily Show are minuscule (21 and 18 percent), meaning that only about 120 NPR/Daily Show listeners/viewers were polled, leaving the margin of error somewhere near 10-12 percent. (I don't have my charts on me at this point).

3. "But the difference on the Egypt question between Fox and NPR/the Daily Show was 19 percent, which is more than 12+6, the margin of errors for each group!" Read the question: "Have the opposition groups protesting in Egypt been successful in bringing down the regime there?" Now, read the survey date: Oct. 17-23. By that point, there were growing calls to end the "transitional" military regime. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/world/middleeast/egypts-military-expands-power-raising-alarms.html?pagewanted=all) The dynamic had changed dramatically from the time when Egypt was revolting against Hosni.

4. "But look at ALL these questions. Clearly Fox is lying, making people dumber." Correlation does not equal causation. Logical regressions do not account for self-selection bias.

Too many journalists believe whatever a "study" says. Critical thinking is a skill that should be nourished and developed. It's been sorely lacking in this thread.

I find it highly ironic that people here will claim that that flawed interpretations of data proves that a news network presents flawed interpretations of events.