Sunday, May 09, 2004 12:02:35 PM
The Hazards of Watching Fox News
By Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service
October 3, 2003
The more commercial television news you watch, the more wrong you are likely to be about key elements of the Iraq War and its aftermath, according to a major new study released in Washington this week.
And the more you watch the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News channel, in particular, the more likely it is that your perceptions about the war are wrong, adds the report by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).
Based on several nationwide surveys it conducted with California-based Knowledge Networks since June, as well as the results of other polls, PIPA found that 48 percent of the public believe US troops found evidence of close pre-war links between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist group; 22 percent thought troops found weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq; and 25 percent believed that world public opinion favored Washington's going to war with Iraq. All three are misperceptions.
The report, "Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War," also found that the more misperceptions held by the respondent, the more likely it was that s/he both supported the war and depended on commercial television for news about it.
The study is likely to stoke a growing public and professional debate over why mainstream news media – especially the broadcast media – were not more skeptical about the Bush administration's pre-war claims, particularly regarding Saddam Hussein's WMD stockpiles and ties with al-Qaeda.
"This is a dangerously revealing study," said Marvin Kalb, a former television correspondent and a senior fellow of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
While Kalb said he had some reservations about the specificity of the questions directed at the respondents, he noted that, "People who have had a strong belief that there is an unholy alliance between politics and the press now have more evidence." Fox, in particular, has been accused of pursuing a chauvinistic agenda in its news coverage despite its motto, "We report, you decide."
Overall, according to PIPA, 60 percent of the people surveyed held at least one of the three misperceptions through September. Thirty percent of respondents had none of those misperceptions.
Surprisingly, the percentage of people holding the misperceptions rose slightly over the last three months. In July, for example, polls found that 45 percent of the public believed U.S. forces had found "clear evidence in Iraq that Hussein was working closely with al Qaeda." In September, 49 percent believed that.
Likewise, those who believed troops had found WMD in Iraq jumped from 21 percent in July to 24 percent in September. One in five respondents said they believed that Iraq had actually used chemical or biological weapons during the war.
In determining what factors could create the misperceptions, PIPA considered a number of variables in the data.
It found a high correlation between respondents with the most misperceptions and their support for the decision to go to war. Only 23 percent of those who held none of the three misperceptions supported the war, while 53 percent who held one misperception did so. Of those who believe that both WMDs and evidence of al-Qaeda ties have been found in Iraq and that world opinion backed the United States, a whopping 86 percent said they supported war.
More specifically, among those who believed that Washington had found clear evidence of close ties between Hussein and al-Qaeda, two-thirds held the view that going to war was the best thing to do. Only 29 percent felt that way among those who did not believe that such evidence had been found.
Another factor that correlated closely with misperceptions about the war was party affiliation, with Republicans substantially "more likely" to hold misperceptions than Democrats. But support for Bush himself as expressed by whether or not the respondent said s/he intended to vote for him in 2004 appeared to be an even more critical factor.
The average frequency of misperceptions among respondents who planned to vote for Bush was 45 percent, while among those who plan to vote for a hypothetical Democrat candidate, the frequency averaged only 17 percent. Asked "Has the US found clear evidence Saddam Hussein was working closely with al Qaeda?" 68 percent of Bush supporters replied affirmatively. By contrast, two of every three Democrat-backers said no.
But news sources also accounted for major differences in misperceptions, according to PIPA, which asked more than 3,300 respondents since May where they "tended to get most of [their] news.'' Eighty percent identified broadcast media, while 19 percent cited print media.
Among those who said broadcast media, 30 percent said two or more networks; 18 percent, Fox News; 16 percent, CNN; 24 percent, the three big networks – NBC (14 percent), ABC (11 percent), CBS (9 percent); and three percent, the two public networks, National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
For each of the three misperceptions, the study found enormous differences between the viewers of Fox, who held the most misperceptions, and NPR/PBS, who held the fewest by far. Eighty percent of Fox viewers were found to hold at least one misperception, compared to 23 percent of NPR/PBS consumers. All the other media fell in between.
CBS ranked right behind Fox with a 71 percent score, while CNN and NBC tied as the best-performing commercial broadcast audience at 55 percent. Forty-seven percent of print media readers held at least one misperception.
As to the number of misconceptions held by their audiences, Fox far outscored all of its rivals. A whopping 45 percent of its viewers believed all three misperceptions, while the other commercial networks scored between 12 percent and 16 percent. Only nine percent of readers believed all three, while only four percent of the NPR/PBS audience did.
PIPA found that political affiliation and news source also compound one another. Thus, 78 percent of Bush supporters who watch Fox News said they thought the United States had found evidence of a direct link to al-Qaeda, while 50 percent of Bush supporters who rely on NPR/PBS thought so.
Conversely, 48 percent of Fox viewers who said they would support a Democrat believed that such evidence had been found. But none of the Democrat-backers who relied on NPR/PBS believed it. The study also debunked the notion that misperceptions were due mainly to the lack of exposure to news.
Among Bush supporters, those who said they follow the news "very closely", were found more likely to hold misperceptions. Those Bush supporters, on the other hand, who say they follow the news "somewhat closely" or "not closely at all" held fewer misperceptions. Conversely, those Democratic supporters who said they did not follow the news very closely were found to be twice as likely to hold misperceptions as those who said they did, according to PIPA.
Jim Lobe writes for the Inter Press Service, AlterNet.org, TomPaine.com, and Foreign Policy in Focus.
© 2003 Independent Media Institute.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16892
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found at: http://www.hypocrites.com/article15348.html
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Fact-Free News
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, October 15, 2003; Page A23
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.
Researchers from the Program on International Policy Attitudes (a joint project of several academic centers, some of them based at the University of Maryland) and Knowledge Networks, a California-based polling firm, have spent the better part of the year tracking the public's misperceptions of major news events and polling people to find out just where they go to get things so balled up. This month they released their findings, which go a long way toward explaining why there's so little common ground in American politics today: People are proceeding from radically different sets of facts, some so different that they're altogether fiction.
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. Fully 48 percent of Americans believed that the United States had uncovered evidence demonstrating a close working relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Another 22 percent thought that we had found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And 25 percent said that most people in other countries had backed the U.S. war against Saddam Hussein. Sixty percent of all respondents entertained at least one of these bits of dubious knowledge; 8 percent believed all three.
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." Eighty percent of Fox viewers believed at least one of these un-facts; 45 percent believed all three. Over at CBS, 71 percent of viewers fell for one of these mistakes, but just 15 percent bought into the full trifecta. And in the daintier precincts of PBS viewers and NPR listeners, just 23 percent adhered to one of these misperceptions, while a scant 4 percent entertained all three.
Now, this could just be pre-sorting by ideology: Conservatives watch O'Reilly, liberals look at Lehrer, and everyone finds his belief system confirmed. But the Knowledge Network nudniks took that into account, and found that even among people of like mind, where they got their news still shaped their sense of the real. Among respondents who said they would vote for George W. Bush in next year's presidential race, for instance, more than three-quarters of the Fox watchers thought we'd uncovered a working relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda, while just half of those who watch PBS believed this to be the case.
Misperceptions can also be the result of inattention, of course. If you nod off for just a nanosecond in the middle of Tom Brokaw intoning, "U.S. inspectors did not find weapons of mass destruction today," you could think we'd just uncovered Hussein's nuclear arsenal. So the wily researchers also controlled for intensity of viewership, and concluded that, "in the case of those who primarily watched Fox News, greater attention to news modestly increases the likelihood of misperceptions." Particularly when that news includes hyping every false lead in Iraq as the certain prelude to uncovering a massive WMD cache.
One question inevitably raised by these findings is whether Fox News is failing or succeeding. Over at CBS, the news that 71 percent of viewers hold one of these mistaken notions should be cause for concern, but whether such should be the case at Fox because 80 percent of their viewers are similarly mistaken is not at all clear. Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes and the other guys at Fox have long demonstrated a clearer commitment to changing public policy than to reporting it, and an even clearer commitment to reporting it in such a way as to change it.
Take a wild flight of fancy with me and assume for just a moment that one major goal over at Fox is to ensure Bush's reelection. Surely, anyone who believes that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were in cahoots, that we've found the WMD and that Bush is revered among the peoples of the world -- all of these known facts to nearly half the Fox viewers -- is a good bet to be a Bush voter in next year's contest. By this standard -- moving votes into Bush's column and keeping them there -- Fox has to be judged a stunning success. It's not so hot on conveying information as such, but mere empiricism must seem so terribly vulgar to such creatures of refinement as Murdoch and Ailes.
The writer will answer questions about this column during a Live Online discussion at 4 p.m. today at www.washingtonpost.com.
meyersonh@washpost.com
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A27061-2003Oct14&a...
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The More You Watch ...
By Joel Bleifuss / 10.17.03
Welcome to the reality distortion chamber; please leave your bullshit detector at the door.
It’s old news that many Americans are know-nothings when it comes to Iraq. According to a Washington Post poll in August, 32 percent of Americans believed it was “very likely” that “Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.” Another poll found that 20 percent of Americans believed that “Iraq did use chemical or biological weapons in the war.”
Researchers at the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) in Washington have plumbed the abyss of this ignorance. Their mission: to discover why “a substantial portion of the public had a number of misperceptions that were demonstrably false [and that] have played a key role in generating and maintaining approval for the decision to go to war.”
From June through September, PIPA polled 3,334 people, asking them about three of “the most egregious misperceptions.”
-- Evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaeda has been found.
-- Weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq.
-- World public opinion favored the United States going to war with Iraq.
The study, “Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War,” found that 60 percent of respondents held one or more of the three misperceptions—an ignorance that played into the Bush administration’s drumbeat for war. PIPA discovered that “among those with just one of the misperceptions, 53 percent supported the war—rising to 78 percent for two of the misperceptions and to 86 percent for those with all three.” Conversely, among those “with none of the three misperceptions,” 77 percent opposed the war.
So why did so many Americans hold opinions that were false “or were at odds with the dominant view in the intelligence community?” the PIPA researchers wondered. Was this ignorance “a function of an individual’s source of news?”
Indeed it was. After asking respondents to name their “primary source of news,” PIPA discovered that “Fox News watchers were most likely to hold misperceptions.” Conversely, an “overwhelming majority” of NPR/PBS consumers “did not have any of the three misconceptions.” (Indeed, 80 percent of Fox News viewers held one misperception and 45 percent held all three. In contrast, 23 percent of those getting their news from NPR/PBS held one misperception and only 4 percent held all three.)
The researchers point out that it is true that audiences for network news shows vary as to education and political affiliation. For example, Fox viewers are more Republican while PBS/NPR consumers are better educated and more Democratic. (They also found that Republicans and those with lower education are more likely to hold misperceptions.)
Yet source of news is still a determining factor. Of the Republicans who get their news from Fox, the average rate for the three key misperceptions was 54 percent, while for Republicans who get their news from PBS/NPR the average rate is 32 percent. On the Democratic side of things, 48 percent of Democrats who watch Fox believe that the United States found a direct Iraqi link to al-Qaeda, while not a single Democrat who relies on PBS/NPR believed any such nonsense.
But “most striking,” say the PIPA researchers, is that among Fox News viewers, those who watch the “fair and balanced” network the most are the ones most likely to hold demonstrably unbalanced misperceptions.
Steven Kull, the director of PIPA and the study’s principal investigator, says, “If people are getting misperceptions, and we can empirically demonstrate that they are, then the media has a responsibility to offset that and counteract them. The media hasn’t been diligent enough in taking into account the way that perceptions and impressions are formed around a quite significant public policy issue.”
As for Fox, Kull says “research shows that Fox gives more airtime to the administration’s representatives and that may be one of the key explanations why Fox viewers have these misperceptions.”
Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked as an investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986. Bleifuss has had more stories on Project Censored's annual list of the “10 Most Censored Stories” than any other journalist.
In These Times ©2003
http://www.inthesetimes.com/firststone/comments.php?id=402_0_8_0_C
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Pubcasting helps audience sort fact, fiction
NPR, PBS audience holds most accurate views of Iraq war, says new study
Originally published in Current, Oct. 20, 2003
By Mike Janssen
Pubcasters welcomed a study released Oct. 2 [2003] that showed people who turn to public broadcasting for news have the most accurate views of the Iraq war among media consumers.
The study, conducted by the polling firm Knowledge Networks and the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes, also highlighted differences between public broadcasting and its competitors. Fox News Channel and public broadcasting, for example, consistently landed at opposite ends of the spectrum of opinion. Fox viewers were almost four times more likely than public broadcasting’s consumers to hold misperceptions about the war (chart at right).
Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh seized on the study as a chance to mock NPR and PBS Oct. 8, the same day an irate Bill O’Reilly walked off NPR’s Fresh Air [story]. O’Reilly later told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he took a beating on Fresh Air because NPR and the “far left” are waging a “jihad” against Fox.
Pubcasters commenting on the study refrained from returning the culture-war volleys, though observers noted that the poll does bring out the contrasts between Fox’s brand of journalism and public broadcasting’s reporting.
“What it says is that you’ve got, for lack of better term, a more objective media” in public broadcasting, said Susan Moeller, a media professor at the University of Maryland. “It’s having more voices being heard, and so the listening public or viewing public is coming away from the newscast with the impression that there’s not just one way of looking at something.”
Others said misperceptions might stem in part from viewers choosing media that tends to reinforce their beliefs.
Fox News declined a request for interview.
Not just ideology
The study found that two-thirds of about 3,000 respondents held at least one of three misperceptions:
Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks or proven to be supporting al-Qaeda;
Weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq; and
International popular opinion favored the U.S. war against Iraq.
Bush administration officials suggested that an Iraqi official met with al-Qaeda, but their claim has not been proven and was discredited by the U.S. intelligence community. No weapons of mass destruction have been found, and polls have shown that people in many countries opposed the United States going to war against Iraq without United Nations backing.
The study then broke down respondents by their primary news sources. Public broadcasting’s consumers consistently were the best informed, while Fox viewers were most likely to misperceive.
Education and political affiliation fail to account wholly for the differences. Republican Fox viewers, for example, were still more likely to hold misperceptions than Republican NPR and PBS subscribers.
Further, “48 percent of Democrat supporters who watch Fox News thought the U.S. has found evidence of a direct link to al-Qaeda, but not one single respondent who is a Democrat supporter and relies on PBS and NPR for network news thought the U.S. had found such evidence,” the study said.
After Fox viewers, CBS viewers were the most likely to hold misperceptions, yet CBS is more often accused of liberal, not conservative bias, noted Steven Kull, PIPA’s director and the study’s principal investigator.
Ideology may still play a part, said Mike Clark, reader advocate at the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, Fla. “People are gravitating to news sources that they personally agree with, so that they may never come in contact with info that might challenge their assumptions,” he said.
“It’s possible that it’s just somehow driven by networks presenting issues in a way that’s more comfortable to listen to. We don’t know,” Kull said. “But we can say that it isn’t simply a function of the ideological bias of the viewers.”
Bias or balance?
Kull said the study does not prove PBS and NPR deserve all the credit for accurate perceptions held by their audiences. “But there’s no way you cannot believe that it’s a positive indicator,” he said.
Pubcasters likewise took the study as good news. Jeffrey Dvorkin, NPR’s ombudsman, called it “very flattering.” “We’ll take any compliments we can get these days,” he said.
“We go out of our way to make sure that we provide in-depth information and give people more sides of the story. So we actually find it gratifying,” said Rob Flynn, director of communications for PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
Like Flynn, Kull and Moeller suggested public broadcasting’s style of news presentation might partly explain results.
“Within a single news piece, [public broadcasting] does better than others at capturing not just . . . the two sides, but multiple sides in a policy matter or even in an event that has just broken,” Moeller said. “Fox, being more headline news-oriented, tends to be repeating the same piece of information over and over again. You don’t get the sense of what other experts are saying, or what the second-day story might have been.”
On PBS and NPR, “you don’t have people who are presenting news in a sort of highly charged, opinionated kind of environment,” Kull said.
Limbaugh’s highly charged, opinionated website characterized PIPA’s work as “the silly study that concluded Fox News viewers are stupid.” Limbaugh said Fox had never deliberately promoted the misperceptions. He also bet that PBS and NPR were not reporting that a recent review of Iraq’s weapons programs showed that “it’s undeniable that a weapons of mass destruction program existed.”
A caller to Limbaugh’s show who called himself Gary suggested, “Let’s take a sample of NPR listeners and see what percentage of them believes flagrantly false propositions about U.S. history or economics or any other subject.” Limbaugh named Gary “Caller of the Day.” Rather than concede that public broadcasters might be the most accurate journalists, Limbaugh tried to paint them as the most left-wing. But Flynn, for one, denied the NewsHour belongs at the end of the political spectrum.
The NewsHour often receives criticism of its coverage from all sides of the issues, Flynn said. “We get enough feedback from viewers that forces us to realize we’re about in the middle, despite what conventional wisdom you want to believe,” he said.
Pubcasting attracts charges of lefty bias because it includes a wider range of voices and stories than other media, Moeller said. “If you look at the range of experts, it still tends to skew pretty centrist and not liberal at all—and not particularly conservative at all either,” she said. “But it is not just following the [Bush] administration’s line.”
Copyright 2003
http://www.current.org/news/news0319study.shtml
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The referenced 10/2/03 PIPA study (which btw was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ford Foundation): http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/Media_10_02_03_Report.pdf
See also: http://lrm102.securednshost.com/pipermail/nationalvoicenews_voicelists.org/2003-October/000035.html
Related 4/22/04 PIPA study "US Public Beliefs on Iraq and the Presidential Election": http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/IraqReport4_22_04.pdf
PIPA home: http://www.pipa.org/
By Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service
October 3, 2003
The more commercial television news you watch, the more wrong you are likely to be about key elements of the Iraq War and its aftermath, according to a major new study released in Washington this week.
And the more you watch the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News channel, in particular, the more likely it is that your perceptions about the war are wrong, adds the report by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).
Based on several nationwide surveys it conducted with California-based Knowledge Networks since June, as well as the results of other polls, PIPA found that 48 percent of the public believe US troops found evidence of close pre-war links between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist group; 22 percent thought troops found weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq; and 25 percent believed that world public opinion favored Washington's going to war with Iraq. All three are misperceptions.
The report, "Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War," also found that the more misperceptions held by the respondent, the more likely it was that s/he both supported the war and depended on commercial television for news about it.
The study is likely to stoke a growing public and professional debate over why mainstream news media – especially the broadcast media – were not more skeptical about the Bush administration's pre-war claims, particularly regarding Saddam Hussein's WMD stockpiles and ties with al-Qaeda.
"This is a dangerously revealing study," said Marvin Kalb, a former television correspondent and a senior fellow of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
While Kalb said he had some reservations about the specificity of the questions directed at the respondents, he noted that, "People who have had a strong belief that there is an unholy alliance between politics and the press now have more evidence." Fox, in particular, has been accused of pursuing a chauvinistic agenda in its news coverage despite its motto, "We report, you decide."
Overall, according to PIPA, 60 percent of the people surveyed held at least one of the three misperceptions through September. Thirty percent of respondents had none of those misperceptions.
Surprisingly, the percentage of people holding the misperceptions rose slightly over the last three months. In July, for example, polls found that 45 percent of the public believed U.S. forces had found "clear evidence in Iraq that Hussein was working closely with al Qaeda." In September, 49 percent believed that.
Likewise, those who believed troops had found WMD in Iraq jumped from 21 percent in July to 24 percent in September. One in five respondents said they believed that Iraq had actually used chemical or biological weapons during the war.
In determining what factors could create the misperceptions, PIPA considered a number of variables in the data.
It found a high correlation between respondents with the most misperceptions and their support for the decision to go to war. Only 23 percent of those who held none of the three misperceptions supported the war, while 53 percent who held one misperception did so. Of those who believe that both WMDs and evidence of al-Qaeda ties have been found in Iraq and that world opinion backed the United States, a whopping 86 percent said they supported war.
More specifically, among those who believed that Washington had found clear evidence of close ties between Hussein and al-Qaeda, two-thirds held the view that going to war was the best thing to do. Only 29 percent felt that way among those who did not believe that such evidence had been found.
Another factor that correlated closely with misperceptions about the war was party affiliation, with Republicans substantially "more likely" to hold misperceptions than Democrats. But support for Bush himself as expressed by whether or not the respondent said s/he intended to vote for him in 2004 appeared to be an even more critical factor.
The average frequency of misperceptions among respondents who planned to vote for Bush was 45 percent, while among those who plan to vote for a hypothetical Democrat candidate, the frequency averaged only 17 percent. Asked "Has the US found clear evidence Saddam Hussein was working closely with al Qaeda?" 68 percent of Bush supporters replied affirmatively. By contrast, two of every three Democrat-backers said no.
But news sources also accounted for major differences in misperceptions, according to PIPA, which asked more than 3,300 respondents since May where they "tended to get most of [their] news.'' Eighty percent identified broadcast media, while 19 percent cited print media.
Among those who said broadcast media, 30 percent said two or more networks; 18 percent, Fox News; 16 percent, CNN; 24 percent, the three big networks – NBC (14 percent), ABC (11 percent), CBS (9 percent); and three percent, the two public networks, National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
For each of the three misperceptions, the study found enormous differences between the viewers of Fox, who held the most misperceptions, and NPR/PBS, who held the fewest by far. Eighty percent of Fox viewers were found to hold at least one misperception, compared to 23 percent of NPR/PBS consumers. All the other media fell in between.
CBS ranked right behind Fox with a 71 percent score, while CNN and NBC tied as the best-performing commercial broadcast audience at 55 percent. Forty-seven percent of print media readers held at least one misperception.
As to the number of misconceptions held by their audiences, Fox far outscored all of its rivals. A whopping 45 percent of its viewers believed all three misperceptions, while the other commercial networks scored between 12 percent and 16 percent. Only nine percent of readers believed all three, while only four percent of the NPR/PBS audience did.
PIPA found that political affiliation and news source also compound one another. Thus, 78 percent of Bush supporters who watch Fox News said they thought the United States had found evidence of a direct link to al-Qaeda, while 50 percent of Bush supporters who rely on NPR/PBS thought so.
Conversely, 48 percent of Fox viewers who said they would support a Democrat believed that such evidence had been found. But none of the Democrat-backers who relied on NPR/PBS believed it. The study also debunked the notion that misperceptions were due mainly to the lack of exposure to news.
Among Bush supporters, those who said they follow the news "very closely", were found more likely to hold misperceptions. Those Bush supporters, on the other hand, who say they follow the news "somewhat closely" or "not closely at all" held fewer misperceptions. Conversely, those Democratic supporters who said they did not follow the news very closely were found to be twice as likely to hold misperceptions as those who said they did, according to PIPA.
Jim Lobe writes for the Inter Press Service, AlterNet.org, TomPaine.com, and Foreign Policy in Focus.
© 2003 Independent Media Institute.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16892
==============================
found at: http://www.hypocrites.com/article15348.html
==============================
Fact-Free News
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, October 15, 2003; Page A23
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.
Researchers from the Program on International Policy Attitudes (a joint project of several academic centers, some of them based at the University of Maryland) and Knowledge Networks, a California-based polling firm, have spent the better part of the year tracking the public's misperceptions of major news events and polling people to find out just where they go to get things so balled up. This month they released their findings, which go a long way toward explaining why there's so little common ground in American politics today: People are proceeding from radically different sets of facts, some so different that they're altogether fiction.
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. Fully 48 percent of Americans believed that the United States had uncovered evidence demonstrating a close working relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Another 22 percent thought that we had found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And 25 percent said that most people in other countries had backed the U.S. war against Saddam Hussein. Sixty percent of all respondents entertained at least one of these bits of dubious knowledge; 8 percent believed all three.
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." Eighty percent of Fox viewers believed at least one of these un-facts; 45 percent believed all three. Over at CBS, 71 percent of viewers fell for one of these mistakes, but just 15 percent bought into the full trifecta. And in the daintier precincts of PBS viewers and NPR listeners, just 23 percent adhered to one of these misperceptions, while a scant 4 percent entertained all three.
Now, this could just be pre-sorting by ideology: Conservatives watch O'Reilly, liberals look at Lehrer, and everyone finds his belief system confirmed. But the Knowledge Network nudniks took that into account, and found that even among people of like mind, where they got their news still shaped their sense of the real. Among respondents who said they would vote for George W. Bush in next year's presidential race, for instance, more than three-quarters of the Fox watchers thought we'd uncovered a working relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda, while just half of those who watch PBS believed this to be the case.
Misperceptions can also be the result of inattention, of course. If you nod off for just a nanosecond in the middle of Tom Brokaw intoning, "U.S. inspectors did not find weapons of mass destruction today," you could think we'd just uncovered Hussein's nuclear arsenal. So the wily researchers also controlled for intensity of viewership, and concluded that, "in the case of those who primarily watched Fox News, greater attention to news modestly increases the likelihood of misperceptions." Particularly when that news includes hyping every false lead in Iraq as the certain prelude to uncovering a massive WMD cache.
One question inevitably raised by these findings is whether Fox News is failing or succeeding. Over at CBS, the news that 71 percent of viewers hold one of these mistaken notions should be cause for concern, but whether such should be the case at Fox because 80 percent of their viewers are similarly mistaken is not at all clear. Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes and the other guys at Fox have long demonstrated a clearer commitment to changing public policy than to reporting it, and an even clearer commitment to reporting it in such a way as to change it.
Take a wild flight of fancy with me and assume for just a moment that one major goal over at Fox is to ensure Bush's reelection. Surely, anyone who believes that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were in cahoots, that we've found the WMD and that Bush is revered among the peoples of the world -- all of these known facts to nearly half the Fox viewers -- is a good bet to be a Bush voter in next year's contest. By this standard -- moving votes into Bush's column and keeping them there -- Fox has to be judged a stunning success. It's not so hot on conveying information as such, but mere empiricism must seem so terribly vulgar to such creatures of refinement as Murdoch and Ailes.
The writer will answer questions about this column during a Live Online discussion at 4 p.m. today at www.washingtonpost.com.
meyersonh@washpost.com
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A27061-2003Oct14&a...
==============================
The More You Watch ...
By Joel Bleifuss / 10.17.03
Welcome to the reality distortion chamber; please leave your bullshit detector at the door.
It’s old news that many Americans are know-nothings when it comes to Iraq. According to a Washington Post poll in August, 32 percent of Americans believed it was “very likely” that “Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.” Another poll found that 20 percent of Americans believed that “Iraq did use chemical or biological weapons in the war.”
Researchers at the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) in Washington have plumbed the abyss of this ignorance. Their mission: to discover why “a substantial portion of the public had a number of misperceptions that were demonstrably false [and that] have played a key role in generating and maintaining approval for the decision to go to war.”
From June through September, PIPA polled 3,334 people, asking them about three of “the most egregious misperceptions.”
-- Evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaeda has been found.
-- Weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq.
-- World public opinion favored the United States going to war with Iraq.
The study, “Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War,” found that 60 percent of respondents held one or more of the three misperceptions—an ignorance that played into the Bush administration’s drumbeat for war. PIPA discovered that “among those with just one of the misperceptions, 53 percent supported the war—rising to 78 percent for two of the misperceptions and to 86 percent for those with all three.” Conversely, among those “with none of the three misperceptions,” 77 percent opposed the war.
So why did so many Americans hold opinions that were false “or were at odds with the dominant view in the intelligence community?” the PIPA researchers wondered. Was this ignorance “a function of an individual’s source of news?”
Indeed it was. After asking respondents to name their “primary source of news,” PIPA discovered that “Fox News watchers were most likely to hold misperceptions.” Conversely, an “overwhelming majority” of NPR/PBS consumers “did not have any of the three misconceptions.” (Indeed, 80 percent of Fox News viewers held one misperception and 45 percent held all three. In contrast, 23 percent of those getting their news from NPR/PBS held one misperception and only 4 percent held all three.)
The researchers point out that it is true that audiences for network news shows vary as to education and political affiliation. For example, Fox viewers are more Republican while PBS/NPR consumers are better educated and more Democratic. (They also found that Republicans and those with lower education are more likely to hold misperceptions.)
Yet source of news is still a determining factor. Of the Republicans who get their news from Fox, the average rate for the three key misperceptions was 54 percent, while for Republicans who get their news from PBS/NPR the average rate is 32 percent. On the Democratic side of things, 48 percent of Democrats who watch Fox believe that the United States found a direct Iraqi link to al-Qaeda, while not a single Democrat who relies on PBS/NPR believed any such nonsense.
But “most striking,” say the PIPA researchers, is that among Fox News viewers, those who watch the “fair and balanced” network the most are the ones most likely to hold demonstrably unbalanced misperceptions.
Steven Kull, the director of PIPA and the study’s principal investigator, says, “If people are getting misperceptions, and we can empirically demonstrate that they are, then the media has a responsibility to offset that and counteract them. The media hasn’t been diligent enough in taking into account the way that perceptions and impressions are formed around a quite significant public policy issue.”
As for Fox, Kull says “research shows that Fox gives more airtime to the administration’s representatives and that may be one of the key explanations why Fox viewers have these misperceptions.”
Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked as an investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986. Bleifuss has had more stories on Project Censored's annual list of the “10 Most Censored Stories” than any other journalist.
In These Times ©2003
http://www.inthesetimes.com/firststone/comments.php?id=402_0_8_0_C
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Pubcasting helps audience sort fact, fiction
NPR, PBS audience holds most accurate views of Iraq war, says new study
Originally published in Current, Oct. 20, 2003
By Mike Janssen
Pubcasters welcomed a study released Oct. 2 [2003] that showed people who turn to public broadcasting for news have the most accurate views of the Iraq war among media consumers.
The study, conducted by the polling firm Knowledge Networks and the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes, also highlighted differences between public broadcasting and its competitors. Fox News Channel and public broadcasting, for example, consistently landed at opposite ends of the spectrum of opinion. Fox viewers were almost four times more likely than public broadcasting’s consumers to hold misperceptions about the war (chart at right).
Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh seized on the study as a chance to mock NPR and PBS Oct. 8, the same day an irate Bill O’Reilly walked off NPR’s Fresh Air [story]. O’Reilly later told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he took a beating on Fresh Air because NPR and the “far left” are waging a “jihad” against Fox.
Pubcasters commenting on the study refrained from returning the culture-war volleys, though observers noted that the poll does bring out the contrasts between Fox’s brand of journalism and public broadcasting’s reporting.
“What it says is that you’ve got, for lack of better term, a more objective media” in public broadcasting, said Susan Moeller, a media professor at the University of Maryland. “It’s having more voices being heard, and so the listening public or viewing public is coming away from the newscast with the impression that there’s not just one way of looking at something.”
Others said misperceptions might stem in part from viewers choosing media that tends to reinforce their beliefs.
Fox News declined a request for interview.
Not just ideology
The study found that two-thirds of about 3,000 respondents held at least one of three misperceptions:
Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks or proven to be supporting al-Qaeda;
Weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq; and
International popular opinion favored the U.S. war against Iraq.
Bush administration officials suggested that an Iraqi official met with al-Qaeda, but their claim has not been proven and was discredited by the U.S. intelligence community. No weapons of mass destruction have been found, and polls have shown that people in many countries opposed the United States going to war against Iraq without United Nations backing.
The study then broke down respondents by their primary news sources. Public broadcasting’s consumers consistently were the best informed, while Fox viewers were most likely to misperceive.
Education and political affiliation fail to account wholly for the differences. Republican Fox viewers, for example, were still more likely to hold misperceptions than Republican NPR and PBS subscribers.
Further, “48 percent of Democrat supporters who watch Fox News thought the U.S. has found evidence of a direct link to al-Qaeda, but not one single respondent who is a Democrat supporter and relies on PBS and NPR for network news thought the U.S. had found such evidence,” the study said.
After Fox viewers, CBS viewers were the most likely to hold misperceptions, yet CBS is more often accused of liberal, not conservative bias, noted Steven Kull, PIPA’s director and the study’s principal investigator.
Ideology may still play a part, said Mike Clark, reader advocate at the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, Fla. “People are gravitating to news sources that they personally agree with, so that they may never come in contact with info that might challenge their assumptions,” he said.
“It’s possible that it’s just somehow driven by networks presenting issues in a way that’s more comfortable to listen to. We don’t know,” Kull said. “But we can say that it isn’t simply a function of the ideological bias of the viewers.”
Bias or balance?
Kull said the study does not prove PBS and NPR deserve all the credit for accurate perceptions held by their audiences. “But there’s no way you cannot believe that it’s a positive indicator,” he said.
Pubcasters likewise took the study as good news. Jeffrey Dvorkin, NPR’s ombudsman, called it “very flattering.” “We’ll take any compliments we can get these days,” he said.
“We go out of our way to make sure that we provide in-depth information and give people more sides of the story. So we actually find it gratifying,” said Rob Flynn, director of communications for PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
Like Flynn, Kull and Moeller suggested public broadcasting’s style of news presentation might partly explain results.
“Within a single news piece, [public broadcasting] does better than others at capturing not just . . . the two sides, but multiple sides in a policy matter or even in an event that has just broken,” Moeller said. “Fox, being more headline news-oriented, tends to be repeating the same piece of information over and over again. You don’t get the sense of what other experts are saying, or what the second-day story might have been.”
On PBS and NPR, “you don’t have people who are presenting news in a sort of highly charged, opinionated kind of environment,” Kull said.
Limbaugh’s highly charged, opinionated website characterized PIPA’s work as “the silly study that concluded Fox News viewers are stupid.” Limbaugh said Fox had never deliberately promoted the misperceptions. He also bet that PBS and NPR were not reporting that a recent review of Iraq’s weapons programs showed that “it’s undeniable that a weapons of mass destruction program existed.”
A caller to Limbaugh’s show who called himself Gary suggested, “Let’s take a sample of NPR listeners and see what percentage of them believes flagrantly false propositions about U.S. history or economics or any other subject.” Limbaugh named Gary “Caller of the Day.” Rather than concede that public broadcasters might be the most accurate journalists, Limbaugh tried to paint them as the most left-wing. But Flynn, for one, denied the NewsHour belongs at the end of the political spectrum.
The NewsHour often receives criticism of its coverage from all sides of the issues, Flynn said. “We get enough feedback from viewers that forces us to realize we’re about in the middle, despite what conventional wisdom you want to believe,” he said.
Pubcasting attracts charges of lefty bias because it includes a wider range of voices and stories than other media, Moeller said. “If you look at the range of experts, it still tends to skew pretty centrist and not liberal at all—and not particularly conservative at all either,” she said. “But it is not just following the [Bush] administration’s line.”
Copyright 2003
http://www.current.org/news/news0319study.shtml
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The referenced 10/2/03 PIPA study (which btw was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ford Foundation): http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/Media_10_02_03_Report.pdf
See also: http://lrm102.securednshost.com/pipermail/nationalvoicenews_voicelists.org/2003-October/000035.html
Related 4/22/04 PIPA study "US Public Beliefs on Iraq and the Presidential Election": http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/IraqReport4_22_04.pdf
PIPA home: http://www.pipa.org/
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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