Haven't we been saying this?!

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Study: Fox News Viewers Misunderstand Issues More than Others
by Adam Buckman Dec 17th, 2010

Fox News Channel viewers were more likely to misunderstand a host of issues and subjects during this fall’s election season than people who relied more on other news sources such as MSNBC, PBS and the network evening newscasts, according to a study just released by the University of Maryland.

To be clear, the study doesn’t say FNC or any other TV news organization deliberately fed misinformation to its viewers. Instead, the study attempted to assess the ability of members of FNC’s audience, and others, to process or understand information correctly.

As a result, the study concluded that, when issues were misunderstood, they were misunderstood most of the time by a greater percentage of the FNC audience than any other group.

The findings were so unflattering to FNC’s audience that one of the channel’s top execs fired back at the university in a New York Times story:
“The latest Princeton Review ranked the University of Maryland among the top schools for having ‘Students Who Study The Least’ and being the ‘Best Party School’,” said Michael Clemente, senior vice president of new for FNC. “Given these fine academic distinctions, we’ll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was ‘researched’ with.”

Here’s an example of how the study presents its findings:

On the issue of President Obama’s birth, and whether he is a natural born citizen of the United States, a question that some people strongly believe is a question: The study found that 63 percent of those who said they watch FNC everyday believe either that the president was not born in the U.S., or that it’s still unclear whether he was born here. By contrast, 41 percent of daily CNN viewers felt the same way, 39 percent of daily MSNBC users and 43 percent of network news viewers.

Of those who said they never watch FNC, 32 percent believed his origins are “unclear.”

Other issues studied by the University of Maryland researchers were economic in nature, concerning the effectiveness and consequences of the Obama administration’s economic stimulus programs for one thing, and for another, whether taxes for the average person increased, decreased or stayed the same during the past year or so.

According to the summary issued by the university, the study was undertaken mostly to assess the effect of political advertising on the public’s understanding of various issues, in an election year in which there were few hard and fast rules governing the accuracy of campaign commercials.

“Following the first election since the Supreme Court has struck down limits on election-related advertising, a new poll finds that 9 in 10 voters said that in the 2010 election they encountered information they believed was misleading or false, with 56 percent saying this occurred frequently,” the study concluded. “A goal of the study was to determine whether Americans perceived that the information [they received from the media they consumed] was reliable, or whether they perceived a high level of misinformation.”

A story on HuffingtonPost.com put in another way: “Overall, 90 percent of respondents said they felt they had heard false information being given to them during the 2010 election campaign.”

It’s an illuminating study, though digesting all of its findings is not the easiest task. And that might have been the problem in the weeks and months leading up to the elections too, when TV viewers and the rest of the electorate were forced to sift through information that often took the form of conflicting claims and counterclaims, all issued in the clamor of political campaign advertising and the high-decibel, partisan debates on the cable talk shows.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::