Fox News viewers less informed about current events, poll shows

A new survey of New Jersey voters comes to a provocative conclusion: Fox News viewers tend to be less informed about current events than those who don’t watch any news at all.

Fairleigh Dickinson University recently questioned 612 adults in New Jersey about how they get their news, offering as options traditional outlets like newspapers and local and national television news, or blogs, websites and even Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”

They then asked a series of factual questions about the major events of the last year, from the “Arab Spring” to the Republican race for president.

For example, respondents were first asked whether, to the best of their knowledge, opposition groups in Egypt had been successful in bringing down the Mubarak regime.

Among NPR listeners, 68% correctly said they had been; only 49% of Fox News viewers answered correctly. In fact, the survey found, Fox viewers were 18 percentage points less likely to answer correctly than those who watched no news at all.

“The results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all,” said Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson.

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One Response to Fox News viewers less informed about current events, poll shows

  1. Micah says:

    It doesn't surprise me that Fox News viewers are less informed, but I'm not sure the professor should be confident in saying "The results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all". Correlation between variables does not automatically imply causation. I haven't seem the details of this survey, but it would take quite a bit of work to bridge the gap from correlation to causation. I tend to think that these results have more to do with the type of viewer that Fox attracts as opposed to something that happens to the viewer as a result of watching Fox news.

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