Head in the Cloud (William Poundstone) p232-3
I found that the Fox News audience was less likely to be able to name the capital of Canada or explain the uncertainty principle, to know the number of justices on the US Supreme Court or the religion of the Dalai Lama, to find South Carolina or Antarctica on a map, to know the names of their senators or the size of the federal budget, to recognize Pluto as a dwarf planet, or to know that Judaism preceded Christianity.One question on which the Fox News audience did okay was the compound interest question. (“How long will it take to double your investment at seven percent return?”) Sixty percent of Fox viewers got it right, a score in the middle of the pack – better than the audiences for many Internet news sources.
If we needed a reminder that our sources of news and information matter, here it is. In this chapter I will try to account for the knowledge gap between news audiences and explore what it tells us about staying informed.
The first thing to say is that the Fox News effect is a correlation that does not imply causation.
Consider another Rupert Murdoch-controlled news medium: the New York Post. Imagine that a study showed that New York Post readers are less informed than New York Times readers. Would anybody be surprised?
No one familiar with those newspapers would. The Post is a tabloid-format newspaper convenient for reading on public transportation. It has brassy headlines and a sports section outshining the Times’ anaemic one. Advertisers are well aware that the average Post reader is less educated and less affluent than the average Times reader. Judging by the content, the average Post reader is engaged by local crime, human interest, celebrity gossip, and sports. The Post audience cares less about the national and international news, policy analysis, and arts coverage to be found in abundance in the Times.
My point is that knowledge differences between news sources inevitably reflect differences in audience demographics. The Fox audience may be less educated than others, and this would pull down knowledge scores. (Are there PhDs who watch Fox? Sure, but they aren’t watching because they understand Fox to be an elitist network for the super-educated conservative. They’re watching because they want to keep up with a channel that influences mass ‘opinion.)
The Fox audience scored lower both on current events (that they must have learned, or failed to learn, from the news sources they followed) and on timeless facts that they might have learned in school. Fox News does not have much cause to mention the second digit of pi or to note that “veil of tears” is grammatically incorrect.
But Fox News viewers were less likely to know these things, too.
Readers might be tempted to infer that liberal news sources have the most knowledgeable audiences. A counterexample is the Wall Street Journal, which has a very conservative editorial page. It scored as well as any other news source.
To some of its critics, Fox News is the confirmation bias network, reassuring viewers by telling them what they already believe.
Fox News was created for a conservative audience that felt ignored and marginalized by the mainstream media. But if it’s true that Fox News programming appeals especially to those conservatives who want validation of their beliefs and prefer not to hear anything challenging those convictions, that could limit the range of stories presented and help account for the Fox News effect.
Another common analysis is that Fox News lies. That’s something like the idea that the tabloid press lies. Both the tabloids and Fox have a different definition of news from that of mainstream media, but nearly all of what they report as news is grounded in reality.
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