I'm always grouching about how bad TV is, but even I have to admit that even though almost all of it is bad, some TV is worse than other TV.A University of Maryland study has found that regular Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than other TV news watchers. By "misinformed," they mean that Fox News viewers do not know or refuse to recognize provable facts.
By provable facts I mean things that are so well documented and recorded that there can be no doubt by anyone who isn't delusional or habitually lied to, such as, the San Francisco Giants won the most recent World Series.
Fox watchers more often than not believe that the opposite of the provable facts is true. For example, regular Fox News viewers tend to believe that:
1. The Obama stimulus package caused job losses and did not include any tax cuts;
2. Most economists estimate the health care law will make the deficit worse;
3. Most scientists doubt that climate change is occurring;
4. That their own income taxes have gone up (I love that one!);
5. The bailout of the auto industry ONLY occurred under Obama;
6. That when TARP was voted on in Congress, most Republicans opposed it;
7. That Obama was not born in the U.S.
I don't know if the U. of Maryland researchers quizzed respondents on whether they believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. Probably not, but the results are bad enough without that.
Considering the number of people who watch Fox News regularly and how big a segment of the total population they are, these findings make an extremely sad presentation of the fitness of the U.S. voting public to participate in a Democracy. Millions upon millions of people believe things only idiots or lunatics could believe, or, if not that, people getting most of their information from tainted and dishonest sources. "Disinformation," that's called, and those who swallow it are so misinformed that many of them believe with an almost religious intensity the outrageous lies of a media source which insults and demeans them at the same time it lies to them by telling them that unlike other citizens of the John Q. Public, they're in the know.
Illustration: "Glox News" is the satirical presentation of a news channel from a parallel universe where the new anchors and commentators are gastropod-like space aliens. It appears occasionally and irregularly as the weekly cartoon in Tom Tomorrow's "This Modern World."
2 comments:
hi Dave. One thing I was waiting for someone to say was finally mentioned by Bernie Sanders. He said something to the effect that Social Security is facing a new threat, IIRC. I say that both main parties have condemned Social Security now. The active defunding of the program has begun with the 2% tax reduction. It's simply a matter of time now. The die is cast.
The world has done the exact opposite of what it needed to do in response to the scamming of the bankers by embracing even more so the evil philosophy of economic competition against __ (commonly called capitalism). Even Cuba. I think the little guy has been disenfranchised from the planet. This is much more a planet of the rich, who are intending to inherit it by themselves. That is what I see. Well after all, that is the natural way. No wonder it is happening.
Joe, the people who are doing this to us are so destructive that they're ultimately self-destructive.
I'm angry but I'm not worried. They've got all the money and all the power. We've got Julian Assange.
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