In one of his typical columns for the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect recently argued that Americans in general, but Fox viewers in particular, are dumb.
Ever worry that millions of your fellow Americans are walking around knowing things that you don’t? That your prospects for advancement may depend on your mastery of such arcana as who won the Iraqi war or where exactly Europe is?
Then don’t watch Fox News. The more you watch, the more you’ll get things wrong….
In a series of polls from May through September, the researchers discovered that large minorities of Americans entertained some highly fanciful beliefs about the facts of the Iraqi war….
The researchers then asked where the respondents most commonly went to get their news. The fair and balanced folks at Fox, the survey concludes, were “the news source whose viewers had the most misperceptions.”
Meyerson’s diatribe generated a spirited defense of Fox by John Moody, which in turn generated this letter that appeared in the WaPo last Saturday under the WaPo-writen headline “Facts Don’t Lie, No Matter What”:
In “News for Nincompoops?” John Moody of Fox News ridicules the idea that people who voted for George Bush “come from backward parts of the country,” while Al Gore supporters were “urbane, witty sophisticates” [Free for All, Oct. 18]. But a map of the United States showing how congressional districts voted in 2002 clearly indicates that districts that are home to a university almost universally voted Democratic
I’ve been in and around a large number of universities, but somehow I never noticed that they were populated by hordes of “urbane, witty sophisticates,” or at least no more than normal places. But maybe that’s just me.
Leave that aside, however, and join me in looking at this map of how Congressional districts voted in 2002. Take a close look. Six or seven states are virtually all Red, or Republican. I assume those states have universities, and that they are in districts that voted Republican in 2002. But let’s be generous and ignore those. They’re in “fly-over America,” after all, and so we don’t have to count them. But if you look even more closely I’m sure you can spot some Red districts that are home to universities even our letter writer would regard as real. I didn’t spend much time looking, but even I found several right off the bat: Pennsylvania 5, home of Penn State, voted 87% Republican; Iowa 2 (University of Iowa) voted 52% Republican; Ohio 15 (Ohio State), 67% Republican; and, close to home (in fact, home), Virginia 5 (UVa), 64% Republican. Etc.
Districts with universities “almost universally” voted Democratic in 2002? Only if you don’t count all the ones that didn’t. “Facts Don’t Lie; No Matter What,” as the WaPo headline writer wrote, but letter writers — perhaps especially those who claim they and their partisan friends are blessed with a higher intelligence than the rubes who disagree with them — sometimes get them wrong.
The average Fox viewer makes about $60K a year and they’re stupid.
OK.
I’m waiting for the analysis that shows how people vote as a function of how productive versus protected they are.
Lets see – small business owners, corporate middle managers, etc…- republican
– welfare recipients, social security, teachers unions, tenured faculty, etc… – democrat
Mike, don’t forget the obscenely (sp)filthy rich.
One of my favorite Peanuts cartoons is where Lucy tells Charlie Brown that women are smarter than men. The reason she knows that it must be true is because the research was done by women scientists.
There have been a number of “studies” that have been published recently that have “shown” that conservatives are mentally defective, have fascist tendencies, are stupid etc. However, one must take into account the fact that these studies are being done by liberal academics.
1) I am sure survey can be tweaked to make whoever read New York Times, LA Times and watch CNN are a bunch of bozo living in dream land, good for nothing except when dead.
2) Logic dictates that out of 1 Million people watching Fox News, at least 1000 of them having IQ higher than Harold Meyerson’s, that is I assume he has some.
dissectleft.blogspot.com is interesting.
“Postings by John Ray from Brisbane, Australia about the psychology, sociology and history of political Leftism”
Actually, I found the study that a majority of Fox New viewers believe Saddam Hussein not only possessed WMD but used them against American troops rather scary. The human race doesn’t like to admit that propaganda works; we think we are all too smart for that. We aren’t, and people who watch the propaganda of Fox News are learning what I will politely call a different reality.
I don’t think that makes them stupid; I suppose if I had a liking for watching Al Jazeera I’d start believing a somewhat different reality, too.
I have found the link to the study through Googling
http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/Media_10_02_03_Report.pdf
Just a quick look at the table, I think I have overestimate Harold Meyerson’s IQs. He is practicing advocacy journalism and have an axe to grind. The percentage of other networks misperception is not very far from Fox News and if you add the networks those having liberal tendency such as CNN, CBS and ABC, it beat the conservative Fox News for sure. Another thing is the lack of definition of what is WMD when doing the survey, so it’s all up to the respondents to interpret. Is it chemical, biological, nuke or something in between? Go read the report yourself.
I’d like Lanny to explain how you can combine CBS, NBC, and ABC—which all scored better than Fox—in a way that will average out worse than Fox. I didn’t know Fox had started televising mathematics classes, but from Lanny’s arithmetic, it looks like it. (If you don’t understand this, Lanny, I suggest you lay off the IQ comments for a while.)
[Incidentally, it scarcely matters how WMD are defined for the question of whether our soldiers suffered attacks from them. The Iraq Army didn’t come up with anything much worse than tank shells and RPGs, hardly WMD in anybody’s book. Nor would ambiguity over the meaning of WMD explain a difference between networks.]
Andrew, I think I remember seeing some news articles that suggested that some of the mysterious illnesses that Gulf War I vets are experiencing could be due to nerve agents they were exposed to during that war. I don’t watch Fox News, so I don’t know if it reported that, but maybe that’s what those viewers were thinking of. It’s not totally out of the question. My brother-in-law served in Vietnam, and he suffers from non-Hodgkins lymphoma, which only recently was linked to exposure to Agent Orange. (Of course, we used that, but not as a WMD.)
Laura, this was a study about WMD in the current Iraq War, not the 1991 war.
I agree there is some possibility that Saddam used chemical agents in 1991, but not 2003. (They appear all to be destroyed or discarded, after all.)
Andrew (my friend and foil): The fact is that in 1998, when the weapons inspectors left Iraq, EVERYONE (Saddam included) agreed that Iraq had WMDs.
Now, possibly you believe that he destroyed these devices surreptitiously, so as to not invoke the removal of international sanctions (You know how pariah status has a certain cachet), or possibly you believe that Saddam himself only THOUGHT that he had these weapons, when in fact he was mistaken. But what is incontrovertable is that he did, in fact, have WMDs. Though, I’m certain many Kurdish families could clarify this point more readily than I.