Replies to post #455139 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Consuming content from Fox News is associated with decreased knowledge of science and society

"Egocentric victimhood is linked to support for Trump, study finds"

I think this article both agrees to some degree with it's title, and encourages caution in broader interpretation.

by Eric W. Dolan
July 31, 2020


[Insert: Yes, that shit is gone now, and Fox News has suffered since. Consider what that suggests.]

People who visit FoxNews.com are no more or less likely to understand how the U.S. political system works compared to those who use other online media sources, according to a new study published in American Politics Research .. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1532673X20915222 . But the study provides some initial evidence that using Fox’s website is associated with reduced knowledge about several politically-relevant topics, such as the state of the economy.

“A few years back, there was a poll that suggested Fox News viewers were less knowledgeable .. https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-makes-you-less-informed-than-watching-no-news-at-all-2012-5 .. on important issues than people who abstained from watching the news at all,” said study author Peter R. Licari .. https://www.peterlicari.com/ , a PhD candidate at the University of Florida.

[AHA! That was one which rang bells. Soxfan got it first, 2019 - Fox makes one dumber. No wonder you post like you do
STUDY: Watching Only Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News At All
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=152975544]

“I kept seeing people referencing it on social media but noticed that: 1) It was only about TV news when a lot of news nowadays is consumed over the Internet; and 2) The analysis didn’t control for factors that might influence both Fox News viewership and lower political knowledge.”

“I was originally pretty skeptical of the claim — and I came into the research with that skepticism in hand. For one, there are many different kinds of ‘political knowledge,’ so an all-encompassing effect suggested by headlines and people’s conversational references to the study seemed too over-the-top — and news consumption tends to be positively correlated with political knowledge in general,” Licari explained.

“I realized I knew of a dataset where I could address these issues. I wanted to ‘productively procrastinate’ on my dissertation looking at how video games can increase civic attitudes and political participation, so I dug in.”

For the study, Licari analyzed nationally representative data from 2016 wave of the American National Election Studies .. https://electionstudies. org/project/2016-time-series-study/ . The surveys asked respondents to report their use of online news media sources, including ABC News, BuzzFeed, CNN, Fox News, The Huffington Post, NBC News, The Washington Post, and other outlets.

After controlling for age, gender, race, education, political ideology and other factors, Licari found that using Fox’s website as a news source was associated with lower levels of some types of political knowledge, but not others.

“For some kinds of knowledge, there’s little reason to suspect an association between getting one’s news from FoxNews.com and less knowledge (what I term ‘process-oriented knowledge’ in the paper — or facts about the political system and how things are run),” Licari told PsyPost.

Process-oriented knowledge included things like knowing which party currently had the most members in the U.S. House of Representatives, how many years a United States Senator is elected for, and the political office held by John Roberts.

“But, for other kinds of knowledge (what I call ‘society-oriented knowledge’ comprising important facts about society and things affecting society), the evidence does point to a possible association between visiting the site and lower levels of knowledge,” Licari explained.

Examples of society-oriented knowledge included whether unemployment had gotten better or worse over the past year, whether Barack Obama was a Muslim, and whether the world’s temperature had been slowly increasing over the past 100 years.

“Taking-in additional online sources other than FoxNew.com diminished the negative effect, but the models suggest that, for the vast majority of people, the society-oriented knowledge gap between visitors and non-visitors is pretty durable. That association is statistically and — I feel — substantively significant,” Licari said.

But as with all research, the study includes some limitations.

“First and foremost, this study could only measure statistical associations; it’s not designed to make a causal argument and people should be cautious in interpreting it as such. I included as many controls as I could sensibly do to try and limit the possibility of there being a spurious factor lurking there (such as Party ID, ideology, age, education, 2012 presidential vote, the number of conservative media sources respondents took-in overall, to name a few), but there could always be other unmeasured factors out there in the ether driving both variables,” Licari said.

“It could also be that the causal arrow is reversed. I don’t personally believe it is, but we have to be open to that possibility until other work better-positioned from a causal inference standpoint comes along and settles the issue.”

“I also wish that there were items in the dataset that could make the society-oriented knowledge scale less partisan. There are some things there (like climate change) with a definite partisan lean when it comes to getting the ‘right answer.’ That lean will undoubtedly inject some bias into the measure and into the conclusions. Although, the effects are robust even when those items are nixed from the scale and it just becomes about economic knowledge — so I think that there’s something interesting there that’s still worth following-up on and pursuing,” Licari added.

The researcher hopes his work will inspire additional investigations into the relationship between news media consumption and political knowledge.

“I think that looking at possible informational biases associated with a mainstream news outlet is important work. (And regardless of what Fox’s pundits and uber-fans say — they’re mainstream. You can either be the nation’s most viewed news network or be not-mainstream; can’t have it both ways!) I’d like to see future work come and build off the limitations I know to be there as well as those that undoubtedly are there that I’m not aware of,” he told PsyPost.

“I think, given how many pundits on the network were (and are) skeptical of the COVID-19 outbreak, there might be an understandable temptation to link this paper with the skepticism that is more common among the US right. I’d personally suggest not doing so,” Licari added.

“Instead, I’d recommend Matt Motta, Dominik Stecula, and Christina Farhart’s interesting paper “How Right-Leaning Media Coverage of COVID-19 Facilitated the Spread of Misinformation in the Early Stages of the Pandemic in the U.S. .. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-journal-of-political-science-revue-canadienne-de-science-politique/article/how-rightleaning-media-coverage-of-covid19-facilitated-the-spread-of-misinformation-in-the-early-stages-of-the-pandemic-in-the-us/6B0EB93F6BA17608D82B4D23EDA75E50 ” They get at the topic directly and in a way with far better causal leverage than I’m able to get at here.”

https://www.psypost.org/2020/07/consuming-content-from-foxnews-com-is-associated-with-decreased-knowledge-of-science-and-society-57499

[fuagf]

Truth must win -- Trump’s latest lie showcases MAGA persecution complex at its finest

"Egocentric victimhood is linked to support for Trump, study finds
[...]‘Why Me?’ The Role of Perceived Victimhood in American Politics
Miles T. Armaly corresponding author1 and Adam M. Enders2
[...]Perceiving oneself to be a victim is ubiquitous in American politics. As Horwitz (2018) remarks, “The victim has become among the most important identity positions in American politics” (553). This is no accident. Victimhood is a central theme of modern political messaging. For instance, a Republican strategist observed, “At a Trump rally, central to the show is the idea of shared victimization...Trump revels in it, has consistently portrayed himself as a victim of the media and of his political opponents...” (in Rucker 2019). However, if you consider Trump’s demographic characteristics (white and male) and his successes (in terms of wealth and being president), he is not a victim by any serious societal standard. While Trump’s supporters may, to varying degrees, be victims of certain social and political circumstances, the rallies at which the president is reveling in their shared victimhood are direct consequences of at least their recent political successes.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7778419/ "

Surely Trump's assassination claim should lose him a million votes. Should. Yet
it's likely by now all who may ever have left him have before his latest disgrace.

Getting Americans to believe he’s been mistreated is key to Trump’s political survival.

VIDEO

May 24, 2024, 8:00 PM GMT+10
By Max Burns, Democratic strategist

In campaign seasons past, presidential candidates generally used the long Memorial Day weekend to roll out an avalanche of patriotic messaging about their vision for America’s future. Not so for Republican presidential contender Donald Trump, who chose instead to spend the days leading up to the holiday accusing President Joe Biden of scheming to assassinate him.

Trump’s bogus claim that “Biden was locked and loaded ready to take me out” stems from the FBI’s 2022 raid on his Mar-a-Lago compound, during which Trump claims FBI agents were authorized to use “deadly force .. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-administration-authorized-use-of-deadly-force-mar-a-lago-raid .” The claim showcases Trump’s persecution complex at its finest, with the former president willfully disregarding facts and distorting reality for an audience that mostly doesn’t know better.

Of course Trump being Trump, this whole scandal isn’t without its irony. After all, it was Trump’s legal team that earlier this month claimed before the Supreme Court that presidents could legally assassinate their political rivals ..

. And it was Trump — not Biden — who last November pledged to “root out” political opponents he described as “vermin.”

Trump’s apparent assassination fantasy is more than just narcissism on a national scale.
It’s also a perfect example of his ability to manufacture and spread lies
that weaken American voters’ faith in government.

But Trump’s apparent assassination fantasy is more than just narcissism on a national scale. It’s also a perfect example of his ability to manufacture and spread lies that weaken American voters’ faith in government. And those lies are working. That’s more than a problem for Biden’s re-election campaign; it’s a threat to the republic itself.

Spreading a so-called Big Lie requires two things: an electorate primed by disinformation and a cartel of media-savvy influencers willing to amplify the lie. Republicans have already turned producing disinformation into its own toxic art form, to the point that fewer voters today .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/01/02/jan-6-poll-post-trump/ .. believe the 2020 election was fair than did three years ago. The GOP’s disinformation machine was sophisticated enough by 2019 that it raised concerns among national security officials. It’s an order of magnitude more effective today.

Meanwhile, the MAGA movement has no shortage of sycophants willing to peddle a lie in exchange for Trump’s political favor. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene expanded on Trump’s assassination tall tale in a social media post ..

I made sure that he knew.

The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light.

Does everyone get it yet???!!!!

What are Republicans going to do about it?

I tried to oust our Speaker who funded Biden’s DOJ AND FBI, but Democrats stopped it. https://t.co/XSTevEQsNI pic.twitter.com/o0lUjcEdix

— Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@FmrRepMTG) May 21, 2024

. in which she claims to have warned Trump of his impending murder at Mar-a-Lago. (She conveniently leaves out the fact that Trump wasn’t at his Florida estate at the time.)

Greene’s lie met with a flood of criticism from actual law enforcement experts including former FBI assistant director and MSNBC columnist Frank Figliuzzi, who offered a refresher course on how the department’s deadly force policy works.

https://twitter.com/FrankFigliuzzi1/status/1793052687900049735?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1793052687900049735%7Ctwgr%5E004fe690d7c620f7faae7ac273e284fb17203f74%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fiframe.nbcnews.com%2FcDQeq8C%3F_showcaption%3Dtrueapp%3D1

Within an hour, users had tagged her post with the social media generation’s equivalent of a warning label: the dreaded Community Note .. https://twitter.com/i/birdwatch/n/1793076588298531096 . At least there’s justice online.

Even so, Republican lawmakers continued to defend his impossible version of events. Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar posted that the FBI’s raid was an attempted “hit on Trump,” despite FBI officials confirming in a public statement that agents were following standard operating procedure, which forbids the use of force unless an agent’s life is in imminent danger.

None of that matters to the Republicans who profit from amplifying Trump’s lie. “These people are sick,” Fox News anchor Jesse Watters said of Biden and the FBI in a prime-time segment Tuesday. Megyn Kelly scolded Biden for “endanger[ing] everybody down there.”

VIDEO -- ‘Shocking and brazen’: New documents unsealed in Trump classified documents case 11:30

The Republicans peddling Trump’s lie are taking advantage of an electorate that doesn’t understand how the FBI actually works. Despite how federal raids are portrayed in movies and on television, actual FBI raids are mostly coordinated affairs designed to limit officers’ risk of harm. That was especially true at Mar-a-Lago, where armed Secret Service agents patrol the entire building.

Trump’s antics would have many Americans thinking heavily armed FBI agents rappelled through his windows in a made-for-TV assault. But reports indicate the FBI coordinated every step of the raid in advance with Secret Service agents stationed at Mar-a-Lago. When FBI agents arrived at Trump’s gate, it was Secret Service agents who let them in. Agents exchanged paperwork with the Secret Service and walked in through the front door.

Getting Americans to believe he’s been mistreated is key to Trump’s political survival. It’s also working: Trump is more popular now than on the day he left office, in part because a subset of voters believe the 91 criminal charges against him are politically motivated.

Voters who believe Trump was mistreated are more likely to go along with his laundry list of antidemocratic remedies. Unfortunately for our democracy, those remedies include staffing the entire Justice Department with MAGA loyalists and ending all prosecutions into Trump’s criminal misconduct. Coincidentally, that would also make it much easier for a re-elected Trump to prosecute his own political opponents with impunity.

Democrats now have an obligation to give the American people a crash course in how the FBI works, and why Trump’s lies about it don’t stack up. Attorney General Merrick Garland must also come forward to defend the integrity not only of the Justice Department, but of the law enforcement process as a whole.

Because left unchecked, the false claim that Biden tried to assassinate Trump will become this campaign cycle’s Big Lie — where it will warp the electorate in ways that are both dangerous to democracy and incredibly difficult to deprogram. Trump’s lies threaten public faith in our government at every level. Democrats’ defense of the rule of law must be equally ambitious.

Max Burns is a Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies. Find him on Twitter @themaxburns.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-fbi-assassination-claim-maga-persecution-complex-rcna153780