The past few days, I've been writing at Greg's place about the validity of Jon Stewart’s criticisms of Fox News. The fact-checking website Politfact weighed in yesterday, citing a series of public-knowledge surveys showing that on questions of basic knowledge, Fox News viewers scored well within the average.
Politfact thus ruled Stewart's contention that Fox News viewers are “the most misinformed” false:
So we have three Pew studies that superficially rank Fox viewers low on the well-informed list, but in several of the surveys, Fox isn't the lowest, and other general-interest media outlets -- such as network news shows, network morning shows and even the other cable news networks -- often score similarly low. Meanwhile, particular Fox shows -- such as The O'Reilly Factor and Sean Hannity’s show -- actually score consistently well, occasionally even outpacing Stewart’s own audience.
The problem with Politfact's work on this is that they're really comparing apples and oranges. The Pew studies measured viewers' knowledge of certain basic matters that no one is actually suggesting Fox News misinforms its viewers on. No one is arguing that Fox News misleads its audience about which party controls Congress, what volcano erupted last week, or whether John Bolton's mustache is secretary of state. Jane Hamsher had a good response to this, pointing out that being "misinformed" and "ill-informed" are not the same thing. An avid watcher of Fox News would likely be able to identify the speaker of the House or the attorney general, but they're also far more likely to think the president was born in Kenya. Put another way, someone who erroneously believes that the Civil War was fought over "states' rights" and not slavery would still likely know which side of the war Robert E. Lee fought on.
Rather, the issues on which Fox misinforms its viewers are on matters of fact that conservatives would like not to be true. For instance, one recent study that Politfact shied away from because conservatives “criticized its methodology” is the only one that actually measures public knowledge on the issues in question. That survey found that Fox News viewers were far more likely to believe, falsely, that most scientists don't believe climate change is happening, that there were no tax cuts in the stimulus, that income taxes have gone up, and that Obama wasn’t born in the United States. It’s fair to question whether or not respondents should be asked questions about what “economists” thought of the stimulus, but that problem isn’t present with many of the other survey questions, which measure easily verifiable facts not subject to interpretation.
In other words, Politfact's fact check evaluates a claim Stewart wasn't actually trying to make. At best, they can say that Stewart's view that “every poll” shows Fox News viewers to be misinformed is an exaggeration, since to my knowledge we're talking about at most two surveys that tested respondents' knowledge on issues of public debate, as opposed to who the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court happens to be. Another response might be that, as Julian Sanchez pointed out, the surveys measured questions that a misinformed liberal might get right just on partisan grounds. But the Pew public knowledge surveys bear no relationship to the argument Stewart was making.
UPDATE: Steve Benen and Chris Mooney point out that several other surveys on specific issues like climate change and health care support Stewart's argument.
