Fox News false statements

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Fox News False Statements
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"Wow! Fox News is like a lying dynasty. They're like the New England Patriots... of lying." True, oh, so true! All in all, this is one of his better take-downs of Fox, don't you think?

If you're interested, here's the "annotated edition" of Jon Stewart's claims, a single page at PolitiFact with links to every Fox News-related fact check Stewart mentioned.

Here's another interesting page at PolitiFact. Apparently, readers wrote in to comment on the first part of this, Jon Stewart's claim that Fox News viewers are consistently the most misinformed:

One reader wrote, "I'm afraid I'm rather disappointed with this article. The methodology is fine, no question. You gather the facts, you report fairly what you find. The problem is you were analyzing the wrong facts."

"Again and again you say in this article the word ‘ill-informed,’" the reader continued. "The problem is that Stewart did not, in fact, choose this word. He actually chose misinformed, which is a bit different, at least to my mind. When I hear ‘ill-informed,’ I think of receiving little information. I might use that word to speak of someone who pays little attention to the news. When I hear the word ‘misinformed,’ I think of something else quite different. That brings to mind someone who has been informed, but with the wrong information." ...

Steven Kull, the director of WorldPublicOpinion.org, wrote us after the story appeared to say that testing for lack of knowledge is not enough. "We analyzed the effect of increased exposure to news outlets. We found that with all other outlets, increased exposure generally resulted in less misinformation. However, for Fox viewers, on nine points of information, increased exposure correlated with increased misinformation. This was true of only one point of information for public broadcasting and MSNBC viewers, and two points of information for network news. This effect was found in the 2003 study as well. Fox viewers were the only group for whom increased exposure resulted in greater misinformation."

Kull added that, "simply on face value, such issues as knowledge of who was vice president are unlikely to be related to exposure to news outlets. Information on issues that were very foreground in media reporting and analysis, which ours were, are more likely to be related to exposure" to media outlets.

Fox News viewers might indeed know who the vice-president is. That's the kind of factual information that Fox News is unlikely to spin. Why would they? What political value would there be in it?

That makes it possible to be misinformed, without necessarily seeming overly ill-informed. Well, that's the argument, anyway. I report, you decide. :)