Incredible article, even as unsurprising as these facts are:
Fact-Free News
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, October 15, 2003; Page A23
Ever worry that millions of your fellow Americans are walking around knowing
things that you don't? That your prospects for advancement may depend on
your mastery of such arcana as who won the Iraqi war or where exactly Europe
is?
Then don't watch Fox News. The more you watch, the more you'll get things
wrong.
Researchers from the Program on International Policy Attitudes (a joint
project of several academic centers, some of them based at the University of
Maryland) and Knowledge Networks, a California-based polling firm, have
spent the better part of the year tracking the public's misperceptions of
major news events and polling people to find out just where they go to get
things so balled up. This month they released their findings, which go a
long way toward explaining why there's so little common ground in American
politics today: People are proceeding from radically different sets of
facts, some so different that they're altogether fiction.
In a series of polls from May through September, the researchers discovered
that large minorities of Americans entertained some highly fanciful beliefs
about the facts of the Iraqi war. Fully 48 percent of Americans believed
that the United States had uncovered evidence demonstrating a close working
relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Another 22 percent thought
that we had found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And 25 percent
said that most people in other countries had backed the U.S. war against
Saddam Hussein. Sixty percent of all respondents entertained at least one of
these bits of dubious knowledge; 8 percent believed all three.
The researchers then asked where the respondents most commonly went to get
their news. The fair and balanced folks at Fox, the survey concludes, were
"the news source whose viewers had the most misperceptions." Eighty percent
of Fox viewers believed at least one of these un-facts; 45 percent believed
all three. Over at CBS, 71 percent of viewers fell for one of these
mistakes, but just 15 percent bought into the full trifecta. And in the
daintier precincts of PBS viewers and NPR listeners, just 23 percent adhered
to one of these misperceptions, while a scant 4 percent entertained all
three.
Now, this could just be pre-sorting by ideology: Conservatives watch
O'Reilly, liberals look at Lehrer, and everyone finds his belief system
confirmed. But the Knowledge Network nudniks took that into account, and
found that even among people of like mind, where they got their news still
shaped their sense of the real. Among respondents who said they would vote
for George W. Bush in next year's presidential race, for instance, more than
three-quarters of the Fox watchers thought we'd uncovered a working
relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda, while just half of those who
watch PBS believed this to be the case.
Misperceptions can also be the result of inattention, of course. If you nod
off for just a nanosecond in the middle of Tom Brokaw intoning, "U.S.
inspectors did not find weapons of mass destruction today," you could think
we'd just uncovered Hussein's nuclear arsenal. So the wily researchers also
controlled for intensity of viewership, and concluded that, "in the case of
those who primarily watched Fox News, greater attention to news modestly
increases the likelihood of misperceptions." Particularly when that news
includes hyping every false lead in Iraq as the certain prelude to
uncovering a massive WMD cache.
One question inevitably raised by these findings is whether Fox News is
failing or succeeding. Over at CBS, the news that 71 percent of viewers hold
one of these mistaken notions should be cause for concern, but whether such
should be the case at Fox because 80 percent of their viewers are similarly
mistaken is not at all clear. Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes and the other guys
at Fox have long demonstrated a clearer commitment to changing public policy
than to reporting it, and an even clearer commitment to reporting it in such
a way as to change it.
Take a wild flight of fancy with me and assume for just a moment that one
major goal over at Fox is to ensure Bush's reelection. Surely, anyone who
believes that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were in cahoots, that we've found
the WMD and that Bush is revered among the peoples of the world -- all of
these known facts to nearly half the Fox viewers -- is a good bet to be a
Bush voter in next year's contest. By this standard -- moving votes into
Bush's column and keeping them there -- Fox has to be judged a stunning
success. It's not so hot on conveying information as such, but mere
empiricism must seem so terribly vulgar to such creatures of refinement as
Murdoch and Ailes.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Posted by bluprnt at October 17, 2003 06:08 PM