Faux News has been the single biggest promoter of the rabid tea bagger movement. Which speaks volumes about how well the average tea bagger is. Fox promotes the tea baggers and Fox is the favorite "news" source of the soft-fascist movement known as tea baggers. Tea baggers or Fox Viewers are the least well informed of all news viewers. If someone bases their opinions on biased right-wing opinion and urban myths its impossible for them to make a valauable contribution to any debate about public policy.
Surveys: Fox News viewers misinformed on issues
NBC News poll: Fox News viewers more misinformed on health care. An August 19 blog post from NBC News' Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Domenico Montanaro, and Ali Weinberg wrote that Fox News viewers are more likely to believe health care misinformation that "nonpartisan fact-checkers say are untrue about the legislation that has emerged so far from Congress." From their blog post:
*** FOX vs. CNN/MSNBC: Here's another way to look at the misinformation: 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. What's more, a good chunk of folks who get their news from broadcast TV (NBC, ABC, CBS) believe these things, too. This is about credible messengers using the media to get some of this misinformation out there, not as much about the filter itself. These numbers should worry Democratic operatives, as well as the news media that have been covering this story.
University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes: "Those who primarily watch Fox News are significantly more likely to have misperceptions" about Iraq/WMD. An October 2003 study conducted by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) found Fox News viewers were "significantly more likely to have misperceptions" about the Iraq war than all other media consumers. The study was "based on a series of seven US polls conducted from January through September" 2003 and measured respondents' "key perceptions and beliefs" on "US policy" in Iraq. The study found that "[t]hose who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions." For instance, of the "three key misperceptions" -- which the study listed as "the beliefs that ... links between Iraq and al-Qaeda have been found, that WMD [weapons of mass destruction] have been found in Iraq and that world public opinion approved of the US going to war with Iraq" -- Fox News watchers were found not only to be the "most likely to hold misperceptions," but "were more than twice as likely than the next nearest network to hold all three misperceptions." The PIPA study found that 80 percent of Fox News viewers held at least one of the three misperceptions.
Its also sad the other networks are doing almost as badly as Fox at providing fact checks on daily events. Fox actively spreads disinformation even in segments of their programming billed as "straight news".
