by is Mooney
144 cut from his post For Frum’s own story, see David Frum, “When did the GOP lose touch with reality?” New York Magazine, November 20, 2011. Available online at http://nymag.com/print/?/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011–11/.
145 “American culture war of fact” Dan M. Kahan et al, “The Second National Risk and Culture Study: Making Sense of—and Making Progress in—the American Culture War of Fact,” October 3, 2007. Available online at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1017189.
145 explicitly tribal behavior based on party affiliation For this overview of the causes of our partisanship, and on the growth of the conservative movement in general, I’ve drawn on Neil Gross, Thomas Medvetz, and Rupert Russell, “The Contemporary American Conservative Movement,” Annual Review of Sociology, 2011, vol. 37, p. 325–354.
145 self-selecting into “blue” and “red” states Bishop B, Cushing RG. 2008. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Cited in Neil Gross, Thomas Medvetz, and Rupert Russell, “The Contemporary American Conservative Movement.”
146 “you turned on Walter Cronkite” Interview with Peter Ditto, August 26, 2011.
Chapter Eight
The Science of Fox News
In June 2011, Jon Stewart went on air with Fox News’s Chris Wallace and started a major media controversy over the channel’s misinforming of its viewers. Sadly, the outcome only served to demonstrate how poorly our political culture handles the problem of systemic right-wing misinformation, and how much it ignores the root dynamics behind its existence.
Stewart has long been sparring with and mocking Fox. But one statement that he made that day, both because it was both so definitive and also so damning, struck the most devastating blow. “Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers?” Stewart asked Wallace. “The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.”
Stewart’s statement was accurate. The next day, however, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking site PolitiFact weighed in and rated it “false.” In claiming to check Stewart’s “facts,” PolitiFact ironically committed a serious error—and later, doubly ironically, failed to correct it.
PolitiFact’s erroneous rebuttal set off a tizzy at Fox News where—on The O’Reilly Factor, Fox Nation, and Fox News Sunday—Stewart was bashed and PolitiFact lauded for its good (e.g., bad) fact-checking work. Stewart then went on air and apologized, albeit half-seriously, for he proceeded to list a mountain of cases in which PolitiFact had caught Fox spewing misinformation.
Stewart called the exercise his ascent of “Mount Fib.”
Yuks aside, PolitiFact was wrong, and Stewart was initially right—but wrong to accept the site’s correction. Thus, once PolitiFact weighed in, we moved from a situation in which at least one person was getting it right (Stewart) to a situation in which three individuals or organizations were in error—Stewart, PolitiFact, and Fox News—even as all of them now considered the matter closed. How’s that for the power of fact checking?
There probably is a group of media consumers out there who are more misinformed, overall, than Fox News viewers. But if you only consider mainstream U.S. television news outlets with major audiences (e.g., numbering in the millions), it really is true that Fox viewers are the most misled based on the evidence before us—especially in areas of political controversy. This should come as little surprise by now, but is precisely why it is the case remains under-explained at present.
I’ll get to the underlying causes shortly, drawing on what we already know about left-right differences, but also introducing a new concept—“selective exposure.” For Fox News, as we’ll see, represents the epitome of an environmental (“oven”) factor that has interacted powerfully with conservative psychology. The result has been a hurricane-like intensification of factual error, misinformation, and unsupportable but ideologically charged beliefs on the conservative side of the aisle.
First, though, let’s survey the evidence about how misinformed Fox viewers are.
Based upon my research, I have located seven separate studies that support Stewart’s claim about Fox, and none that undermine it. Six of these studies were available at the time that PolitFact took on Stewart; one of them is newer. There may well be other studies out there than these; I can’t claim that my research is utterly exhaustive and there are no black swans. However, given the large amount of attention paid to the Stewart-Fox-PolitiFact flap—and my calls at that time for citations to any other studies of relevance—it seems likely that most or all of the pertinent research came to light.
The studies all take a similar form: These are public opinion surveys that ask citizens about their beliefs on factual but contested issues, and also about their media habits. Inevitably, some significant percentage of citizens are found to be misinformed about the facts, and in a politicized way—but not only that. The surveys also find that those who watch Fox are more likely to be misinformed, their views of reality skewed in a right-wing direction. In some cases, the studies even show that watching more Fox makes the misinformation problem worse.
It’s important to note that not all of these studies are able to (or even attempt to) establish causation. In other words, they don’t necessarily prove that watching Fox makes people believe incorrect things. It could be that those who are already more likely to hold incorrect beliefs (in this case, Republicans and conservatives) are also more likely to watch Fox to begin with, or to seek it out. The causal arrow could go in the opposite direction or in both directions at once.
Let me also add one more caveat. I can imagine (and could probably even design) a study that might find Fox News viewers are better informed than viewers of other cable news channels about some contested topic where biases and misinformation are driven by left-wing impulses (e.g., the kinds of issues discussed in chapter 12). Why this study doesn’t appear to exist I don’t know; but I certainly didn’t come across it in my research. Conservatives ought to perform such a study, if they want to prove Stewart even a little bit wrong.
So with that, here are the studies.
Iraq War
In 2003, a survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland found widespread public misperceptions about the Iraq war. For instance, many Americans believed the U.S. had evidence that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had been collaborating in some way with Al Qaeda, or was involved in the 9/11 attacks; many also believed that the much touted “weapons of mass destruction” had been found in the country after the U.S. invasion, when they hadn’t. But not everyone was equally misinformed: “The extent of Americans’ misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news,” PIPA reported. “Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions.” For instance, 80 percent of Fox viewers held at least one of three Iraq-related misperceptions, more than a variety of other types of news consumers, and especially NPR and PBS users. Most strikingly, Fox watchers who paid more attention to the channel were more likely to be misled.
Global Warming
At least two studies have documented that Fox News viewers are more misinformed about this subject.
In a late 2010 survey, Stanford University political scientist Jon Krosnick and visiting scholar Bo MacInnis found that “more exposure to Fox News was associated with more rejection of many mainstream scientists’ claims about global warming, with less trust in scientists, and with more belief that ameliorating global warming would hurt the U.S. economy.” Frequent Fox viewers were less likely to say the Earth’s temperature has been rising and less likely to attribute this temperature increase to human activities. In fact, there was a 25 percentage point gap between the most frequent Fox News watchers (60%) and those who watch no Fox News (85%) in whether they think global warming is “caused mostly by things people do or about equally by things people do and natural causes.” The correct answer is that global warm
ing is caused mostly by things people do—but clearly, agreeing with this statement is much more accurate than disagreeing with it.
In a much more comprehensive study released in late 2011 (too late for Stewart or for PolitiFact), American University communications scholar Lauren Feldman and her colleagues reported on their analysis of a 2008 national survey, which found that “Fox News viewing manifests a significant, negative association with global warming acceptance.” Viewers of the station were less likely to agree that “most scientists think global warming is happening” and less likely to think global warming is mostly caused by human activities, among other measures. And no wonder: Through a content analysis of Fox coverage in 2007 and 2008, Feldman and her colleagues also demonstrated that Fox coverage is more dismissive about climate science, and features more global warming “skeptics.”
The Feldman study also contained an additional fascinating finding: Those Republicans who did watch CNN or MSNBC were more persuaded than Democratic viewers were to accept global warming. In other words, Republicans in the study seemed much more easily swayed by media framing than Democrats, in either direction. (This is something this book will return to.)
Health Care
Once again, at least two studies have found that Fox News viewers are more misinformed about this topic.
In 2009, an NBC survey found “rampant misinformation” about the health care reform bill before Congress—derided on the right as “Obamacare.” It also found that Fox News viewers were much more likely to believe this misinformation than average members of the general public. “72% of self-identified FOX News viewers believe the healthcare 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,” the survey found. By contrast, among CNN and MSNBC viewers, only 41 percent believed the illegal immigrant falsehood, 39 percent believed in the threat of a “government takeover” of healthcare (40 percentage points less), 40 percent believed the falsehood about abortion, and 30 percent believed the falsehood about “death panels” (a 45 percent difference!).
In early 2011, the Kaiser Family Foundation released another survey on public misperceptions about health care reform. The poll asked 10 questions about the newly passed healthcare law and compared the “high scorers”—those who answered 7 or more correct—based on their media habits. The result was that “higher shares of those who report CNN (35 percent) or MSNBC (39 percent) as their primary news source [got] 7 or more right, compared to those that report mainly watching Fox News (25 percent).” The questions posed had some overlaps with the 2009 NBC poll—for instance, about providing care to undocumented immigrants and cutting some benefits for those on Medicare—but also covered a variety of other factual matters that arose in the healthcare debate.
“Ground Zero Mosque”
In late 2010, two scholars at Ohio State University studied public misperceptions about the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”—and in particular, the prevalence of a series of rumors depicting those seeking to build this Islamic community center and mosque as terrorist sympathizers, anti-American, and so on. All of these rumors had, of course, been dutifully debunked by fact-checking organizations. The result? “People who use Fox News believe more of the rumors we asked about and they believe them more strongly than those who do not.” Respondents reporting a “low reliance” on Fox News believed .9 rumors on average (out of 4), but for those reporting a “high reliance” on Fox News, the number increased to 1.5 out of 4 (on average).
The 2010 Election
In late 2010, the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) once again singled out Fox in a survey about misinformation during the 2010 election. Out of 11 false claims studied in the survey, PIPA found that “almost daily” Fox News viewers were “significantly more likely than those who never watched it” to believe 9 of them, including the misperceptions that “most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring” (they do), that “it is not clear that President Obama was born in the United States” (he was), that “most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses” (it either saved or created several million jobs), that “most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit” (they have not), and so on.
It is important to note that in this study—by far the most critiqued of the bunch—the examples of misinformation surveyed were all closely related to prominent issues in the 2010 midterm election, and indeed, were selected precisely because they involved issues that voters said were of greatest importance to them, like health care and the economy. That was the main criterion for inclusion, explains PIPA senior research scholar Clay Ramsay. “People said, here’s how I would rank that as an influence on my vote,” says Ramsay, “so everything tested is at least a 5 on a zero to 10 scale.”
So the argument that the poll’s topics were chosen so as to favor Democrats, and to punk Fox viewers, doesn’t hold water. Indeed, the poll question that was of least import to voters, and thus whose inclusion was most questionable, was one that provided a clear opportunity to trap Democrats in an incorrect belief—and succeeded in doing so. It was a rather tricky question: Whether President Obama’s allegation that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had raised foreign money to run attack ads on Democratic candidates, and to support Republican candidates, had been “proven to be true.” Actually, PolitiFact had rated the claim as only “half-true,” so “proven to be true” was judged to be incorrect—but 57 percent of Democratic voters gave that wrong answer.
So much for attempts to challenge the topics chosen in this study. And even if you were to throw out the study entirely, the other six remain, and the weight of the evidence barely shifts.
On the subject of Fox News and misinformation, PolitiFact simply appeared out of its depth. The author of the article in question, Louis Jacobson, only cited two of the studies above—“Iraq War” and “2010 Election”—though six out of seven were available at the time he was writing. And then he suggested that the “2010 Election” study should “carry less weight” due to various methodological objections.
Meanwhile, Jacobson dug up three separate studies that, understanding the political mind, we can dismiss as irrelevant. That’s because these studies did not concern misinformation, but rather, how informed news viewers are about basic political facts like the following: “who 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.”
A long list of public opinion studies have shown that too few Americans know the answers to such basic questions. They are insufficiently informed about politics, just as they are about science, economics, and American history. That’s lamentable, but also off point at the moment. These are not politically 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 to agree.
Jon Stewart was clearly talking about political misinformation. He used the word “misinformed.” And for good reason: Misinformation is by far the bigger torpedo to our national conversation, and to any hope of a functional politics. “It’s one thing to be not informed,” explains David Barker, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied conservative talk-radio listeners and Fox viewers. “It’s another thing to be misinformed, where you’re confident in your incorrectness. That’s the thing that’s really more problematic, democratically speaking—because if you’re confidently wrong, you’re influencing people.”
From the point of view of the political brain, the distinction between lacking information and believing misinformation is equally fundamental. Whether you know who the president of Russia is—that’s one type of question. It’s a question where there’s
no political stake and someone who doesn’t know the answer can accept it when it is provided, because it doesn’t require any emotional sacrifice to do so. However, whether global warming is human caused is fundamentally different. It’s a question that is politicized, and thus engages emotions, identity, and classic pathways of biased reasoning. So to group together the lack of information with misinformation is, from this book’s perspective, the most flagrant of fouls.
And it gets even worse for PolitiFact: There are reasons to think that Fox News viewers are both more informed than the average bear, and yet, simultaneously more misinformed on key politicized issues. In other words, many of them are classic “smart idiots” engaging in motivated reasoning to support their beliefs. “They’re an active group, that actually knows a fair amount of political facts,” explains Barker. “They can tell you who the members of the Supreme Court are, and things like that. But when it comes to political information that has any kind of a partisan element to it, where a correct answer helps one side politically, or hurts one side politically, [being misinformed is] very typical of them.”
Thus PolitiFact’s approach was itself deeply uninformed, and underscores the ignorance about psychology that pervades mainstream politics. Indeed, after I refuted its analysis in a much read blog post, PolitiFact failed to correct its error, or even to mention that it had missed four relevant studies in its analysis.
Almost entirely missing in the PolitiFact-Stewart flap was any weighing of the truly interesting and important question: Why are Fox News viewers so misinformed?
