Jon Stewart 1, Politifact 0: Fox News Viewers Are The Most Misinformed

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I have a lot of respect for political fact checking sites. I think they play a critical role, especially in our misinformation-saturated political and mediaย environment.

However, sometimes these sites fall for the allure of phony bipartisanship. In other words, in an environment in which conservatives are more inaccurate and more misinformed about science and basic policy facts, the โ€œfact checkersโ€ nevertheless feel unduly compelled to correct โ€œliberalโ€ errors tooโ€”which is fine, as long as they are reallyย errors.

But sometimes they arenโ€™t. A case in point is Politifactโ€™s recent and deeply misguided attempt to correct Jon Stewart on the topic ofโ€ฆmisinformation and Fox News. This is a subject on which weโ€™ve developed some expertise hereโ€ฆmy recent post on studies showing that Fox News viewers are more misinformed, on an array of issues, is the most comprehensive such collection that Iโ€™m aware of, at least when it comes to public opinion surveys detecting statistical correlations between being misinformed about contested facts and Fox News viewership. Iโ€™ve repeatedly asked whether anyone knows of additional studiesโ€”including contradictory studiesโ€”but none have yet beenย cited.

Stewart, very much in the vein of my prior post, went on the air with Foxโ€™s Chris Wallace andย stated,

โ€œWho are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, everyย poll.โ€

My research, and my recent post, most emphatically supports this statement.ย Indeed, I cited five (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) separate public opinion studies in support of itโ€”although I carefully noted that these studies do not prove causation (e.g., that watching Fox News causes one to be more misinformed). The causal arrow could very well run the other wayโ€”believing wrong things could make one more likely to watch Fox News in the firstย place.ย 

But the fundamental point is, when it comes to believing political misinformation and watching Fox News, I know of no other studies than these fiveโ€“though Iโ€™d be glad to see additional studies produced. Until then, these five all point in one obviousย direction.

โ€œEvery poll,โ€ to quoteย Stewart.

Politifact wasnโ€™t even aware of the studies Iโ€™ve cited. Instead, the siteโ€™s attempt to debunk Stewart largely relied on misunderstanding what heย meant.

What Stewart obviously meantโ€”and what I meanโ€”is that when it comes to politicized, contested issues where the facts have been made murky due to political biases, it is Fox viewers who are the most likely to believe incorrect thingsโ€”to fall prey to misinformation. A quintessential example of such an issue is global warming, or whether Saddam Husseinโ€™s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction or was collaborating with Al Qaeda. There are many, manyย others.

To rebut Stewartโ€™s claim, Politifact relied upon irrelevant and off-point studies. Thus, the site cited a number of Pew surveys that examine basic political literacy and relate it to what kind of media citizens consume. E.g., questions like whether people know โ€œwho the vice president is, who the president of Russia is, whether the Chief Justice is conservative, which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives and whether the U.S. has a trade deficit.โ€

Too few citizens know the answers to such basic questionsโ€”which is lamentable, but also irrelevant in the current context. These are not contested issues, nor are they skewed by an active misinformation campaign. As a result, on such issues, many Americans may be ill-informed but liberals and conservatives are nevertheless able toย agree.

Moreover, on such issues, I would expect cable news viewers of all types to be generally better informed than the general public, because such viewers are, by definition, politically engagedโ€”they care about politics. So they are more likely to know the baseline stuff, whatever channel they watch. (Politifact partly acknowledges the criticism here, but still tries to saveย face.)

Thatโ€™s precisely what was found in a study of a related type of media: Right wing talk radio. C. Richard Hofstetter of San Diego State and his colleagues found of right wing radio listeners that โ€œdespite the flamboyance of many hosts and messages, audiences nevertheless appear to hold higher levels of information in association with involvement with political talk.โ€ And yet at the same time, the researchers also found that โ€œexposure to conservative talk shows was related to increased misinformation, while exposure to moderate political talk shows was related to decreased levels of political misinformation, after controlling for other variables.โ€ In other words, this study found something very similar to what has been repeatedly found aboutย Fox.

Thus, the bulk of the studies cited by Politifact have nothing to do with whether Fox viewers believe the truth, or falsehoods, on politicized and contested issues. I cannot stress how fundamental a distinction this is. Indeed, it is quite literally a separate issue from the perspective of psychology andย neuroscience.

From the point of view of the political brain, whether 2 + 2 = 4, or whether Joe Biden is the vice president, is one type of question. Itโ€™s the type of question where thereโ€™s no political stake and anyone can agree, because it doesnโ€™t require any emotional sacrifice to do so. It therefore likely engages circuits of โ€œcoldย reasoning.โ€

However, whether global warming is human caused is fundamentally different. The latter issue is politicized, and thus engages emotions, identity, and classic pathways of biased reasoning. It therefore likely triggers circuits of โ€œhot reasoning.โ€ (For a study showing why the two are so different with respect to the brain, see here.)

It is of course around contested political facts, and contested scientific facts, where we find active, politically impelled, and emotionally laden misinformation campaignsโ€”and it is in the latter realm that Fox News viewers are clearly more misinformed. Once again, Iโ€™ve cited 5 studies to this effectโ€”concerning the Iraq war, the 2010 election, global warming, health care reform, and the Ground Zero Mosque. By contrast, Politifact only cites two of these studies, and attempts to critique one of them (the 2010 election study)โ€”misguidedly to my mind, but who really even cares. It is obvious where the weight of the evidence lies at this point, unless further, relevant studies are brought toย bear.

As a result of all of this, Politifact should either produce relevant research to rebut Stewart, or run a far more forthcoming retraction than has been issued so far.ย Note, however, that the issue grew a tad more complicated last night when Stewart did an excellent segment on all of this, where he both dramatized how much Fox misinformed viewers and yet also kind of conceded Politifactโ€™s point, when he didnโ€™t actually have to. He wasnโ€™t wrong. They wereย wrong.

When the fact checkers failโ€”and in this case, they not only failed, they generated a falsehood of their ownโ€“they have a special responsibility toย self-correct.

UPDATE:ย Iโ€™ve run across (thanks to Steve Benen) a sixth survey that supports Stewart. It is a 2009 NBC News poll about health care misinformation, and guessย what?ย 

In our poll, 72% of self-identified FOX News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79% of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69% think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75% believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly. But it would be incorrect to suggest that this is ONLY coming from conservative viewers who tune in to FOX. In fact, 41% of CNN/MSNBC viewers believe the misinformation about illegal immigrants, 39% believe the government takeover stuff, 40% believe the abortion misperception, and 30% believe the stuff about pulling the plug on grandma. Whatโ€™s more, a good chunk of folks who get their news from broadcast TV (NBC, ABC, CBS) believe these things, too.

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