Yeah, we know that people watch only one channel. I seriously doubt that you have interpreted the poll correctly (if there was a poll). Your credibility is practically zero.

heh heh, poor Fred.

the survey was interesting in noting that overall, news awareness/knowledge has not changed much in the last 20 years. and the one “news” programming i am less likely to watch than FOX is those insipid network morning shows. they are too awful to endure.

Nothing poor about me. I knew the answers to all the questions in the poll. Unlike closed minded liberals, I get my information from several sources.

Funny how the AP article was rather selective in which results from the study it reported:

http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=319

It leaves out the fact that the fourth most educated group in the study was the audience of the O’Reilly Factor, which beat out NPR’s audience. And Rush Limbaugh’s audience came in just barely behind that.

And yes, Fox News as a whole does pretty bad, but it’s viewership is still as knowledgable as the national average. So your ‘Fox News makes you dumber’ theory is just your personal bias; Fox News appears to have no effect one way or the other (likely due to the fact it’s audience is far larger than any of the other groups mentioned in the study–see regression to mean).

The real conclusion here is that most people don’t watch any news and that any source of news, even a bad one, is likely to make you more informed. Of course that doesn’t fit the ‘evil right wing conspiracy’ template, hence the AP’s selective editing.

Defending Fox by comparing it to the national average is an improper use of the data. The average will by necessity be weighted toward audience size. Precisely because the audience for Fox and the other broadcast TV shows is considerably larger than that for such as the Daily Show – which I’m prepared to assume it is – their results are likely to be close to the average because they have the greatest role in determining what that average is. The only valid comparisons here are source-to-source, not source-to-average.

In that light, what struck me the most was that overall, viewers of broadcast TV news were the worst informed. Which tends to confirm something I think a lot of us have long suspected.

I’ll also note that the reason Fox was ranked so low among sources was that it not only had the second lowest ranking among high scorers, it also had the second highest ranking among low scorers. (Trailing, interestingly enough, regular readers of political blogs. Which applies to no one here, I’m sure.)

But at the end of it all, one other thing: I don’t think you can draw from the results the conclusion that watching such as The Daily Show makes you better informed. Rather, I expect it’s that better-informed people are more likely to watch – after all, the more informed you are, the more you’ll get the jokes.

Oh, a PS:

doesn’t fit the ‘evil right wing conspiracy’ template, hence the AP’s selective editing

And what is that other than an “evil AP conspiracy” template?

Stormy’s got a point, but I think it’s not so much the bias of the AP as an institution, but of the individual reporter. In addition the AP has been caught several times just repeating whatever the White house tells them without any effort to check if said statements had any basis in reality.

One of the nastiest trends in politics and international relations is to assume or pretend the opposition consists entirely of evil morons. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any evil morons out there. But I can’t believe the party that produced Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, Richard Lugar, Mark Hatfield, or George H.W. Bush is entirely filled with evil ignoramuses. Likewise I could do without Dennis Kusinich, Joe Biden, or Al Sharpton.

From the outside, the problem I see the GOP facing is not a lack in intelligence (which the AP report implies) but blind loyalty to people and ideas that have utterly failed.

>The only valid comparisons here are source-to-source, not source-to-average.

If KTK were merely saying that other news sources are much more informative, then you’d be correct. However, he made a much different claim: “watching Fox actually subtracts from your knowledge”. Source-to-average is valid relative to evaluating that claim.

“Fox topped only network morning show viewers.”

Considering the fact that the network morning shows are liberal in content, what does that say about viewers of liberal network morning shows?

Source-to-average is valid relative to evaluating that claim

First, don’t try to make me responsible for what other people said.

But to the point here, no, that comparison is not valid, because, again, broadcast TV, including Fox, pretty much establishes what constitutes the average. Comparing any of them to the average is thus pretty much comparing them to themselves. And I think we can be confident that in any such comparison they will come out pretty much like themselves.

At the same time, I do agree that the results do not show that watching Fox “subtracts” from your knowledge except in one way: If you were come to rely more on Fox (or, as I noted before, any broadcast TV news) and less on news magazines, newspapers, internet news aggregators, and the like, based on the results it would not be unreasonable to expect that over time you would become less informed about current events than you had been. In that sense, broadcast TV news could be said to “subtract” knowledge.