It’s a chicken and egg kind of question. While it’s true that multiple studies have shown that Fox News viewers are incredibly misinformed about current events and basic facts, it’s hard to say how much of that is a result of watching Fox News and how much of it is explained by the type of people that are attracted to Fox News in the first place.
Imagine if you could somehow hold Fox News’ viewership constant but change the programming so that it was entirely factual, as objective as possible, and aimed at educating the public about complex and confusing aspects of public policy and government. In this thought experiment, these viewers wouldn’t become bored and switch the channel to American Dad and new voters would not become attracted to the better quality programming.
Would Fox News viewers begin to show signs that they understood current events and basic facts as well as or better than the viewers of other networks?
My suspicion is that they would make some gains but they would never reach parity. The reason is because their higher brain function is undeveloped or simply damaged. They are attracted to fear and they get some kind of positive rush out of hate. Their capacity for empathy is either lacking or it has atrophied. Without the kind of stimulus that Fox News provides to feed their distorted emotions, they’re unlikely to function, let alone learn.
Of course, this thought experiment is silly. We can’t force people to watch Fox News or any other network, nor would we want to. Yet. I think it’s still true that Fox doesn’t so much misinform as entertain. As Chris Wallace says, Fox viewers “aren’t the least bit disappointed” with what the network does. They don’t really care that they’re being fed a line of bullshit.
I know the feeling. It can be pleasurable to watch a segment on MSNBC that blasts the Republicans even if I feel the segment is ridiculous. But, I don’t really like MSNBC programming for the same reason I don’t like Fox. They both are trying to feed the same thing: permanent outrage. It’s like an addiction, and their audience tunes in for a fix.
But, what am I saying? I’m in the same business. I guess I don’t want to buy what I’m selling.
On the other hand, the shit I am outraged about is at least real.
None of it is news. It’s infotainment.
In that regard, I saw Jon Stewart on Fox News this morning. I really admired his skill at debate, but even he admitted he was doing comedy not news. But he is DAMN good at it.
Via Political Carnival here’s the Jon Stewart clip from this morning
1.) How informed was the public before all of the networks started popping up? That’s really all you need to find out, and there’s no need for these thought experiments. Everyone got their news, generally, from one man: Walter Cronkite.
2.) I hate MSNBC for the same reason. It’s just entertainment. I can’t blame them; FOX sets the agenda, and they need to follow. FOX found a niche we all love, well “we” as a general humanistic we. Certainly not I specifically, nor you.
3.) Lol, you’re not in the same business. You’re selling a completely different product; why else would I come here even when I disagree with you 30% of the time? There are plenty of other bloggers out there, after all. Now some people at FDL, they’re selling similar things (not David Dayen, but without him I doubt I’d go over there at all). So is Yves Smith over at nakedcapitalism; so is Tyler Durden(s) at Zero Hedge (do people still go there lol?).
4.) I’m addicted to news and politics, but I can’t exactly tell you why. I guess it’s because I see politics the same way that Aristotle did: as the master science. Without politics we have nothing but war. Every part of our lives are influenced by it, and it’s very important to be interconnected to know exactly what’s happening.
5.) Touche to the last sentence.
Seabe:
Yes, people still go to Zero Hedge. The one thing that sucks is that five or six people all write under Tyler Durden. So you can’t tell which are the sane ones, and there is one or two, and which ones are the Alex Jones/Von Mises lovers.
I could be suffering from old-folks-those-were-the-good-old-days syndrome but: I believe people were better informed in the 50’s-60’s. In addition to Cronkite, there was Huntley-Brinkley and Hugh Downs did a morning show & specials on issues. All of these news providers & opinionators used calm, reasonable voices. There were a few weekly & monthly news magazines, daily newspapers–you could pick a liberal-slanted one or a right-leaner or read them both–they agreed on basic facts. They didn’t just make shit up or ignore what they didn’t like. I mean, the Civil Rights Movement was a “revolution” or an “evolution” but both sides reported real events as they happened.
I recall my conservative-leaning father having discussions with his liberal-leaning brother. They discussed; they didn’t shout at each other with slogans and think-tank engineered talking points.
Not everyone cared about news or politics, most don’t and never will. But, those who did care had access to genuine information. <heavy sigh>
Seabe, that’s a very rosy picture of the Cronkite-News situation back then. And — if dim memory serves — Walter wasn’t actually the person from whom most got their news, until he passed Huntley-Brinkley/NBC Nightly News in the ratings sometime in the late 60s or 70s.
He also still only delivered up 23 minutes of news in the evening for his network, as did NBC and ABC. Hardly a situation which allows for much more than headlines and a few details. Though, for sure, the longer pieces then were longer than the long pieces of today, and more frequent (e.g., a 1970s study showed the networks political coverage offered up political sound bytes of average 48-seconds in length ca 1968; today, the sound bytes have to be close to the 6-sec range).
Still, Walter was largely an establishment reporter who didn’t question the major policies or political figures of his time (e.g., LBJ and the Tonkin Gulf and Warren Report big lies, or the VN War from 1965-7), at least until his 1968 comments (not on his Evening News show, btw) re the VN War. So, until 1968-VN and 1972-Watergate, he was basically delivering the political establishment’s take on the news. As with, e.g., his very unfortunate softball interview with Mayor Daley at the ’68 Dem convention — Tim Russert-worthy wrt sucking up to power — while the CPD was rioting outside against antiwar protesters.
That said, overall (excepting a few major issues of the 60s, such as political assassinations and the utter lack of skeptical reporting on the official reports), Walter’s news show was probably better at informing viewers than what’s served up today, certainly given the more leisurely pace and emphasis on funding pretty good foreign bureaus all over the world. However he was far from the hard-hitting skeptical reporter/anchor willing to take on the major power figures that some have painted him in retrospect.
That’s not what I said. I just said that there were not very many avenues for news, and most people got their news from the same places (for the most part). Take away Walter, it doesn’t matter; the point remains the same.
Moreover, it was a rhetorical question, one that I don’t have the answer to. Were people actually more informed then, or not? If people were more informed, I think we can believe that Fox DOES make people stupid rather than the other way around.
Well, “not many avenues for news” — that depends. There were far more print newspapers to choose from in a given city or town compared to today. Often the larger cities would have both morning and evening editions of a given paper. Some weekly and monthly news-politics-culture magazines were quite good and meaty — Ramparts (for a while in the 60s), Esquire, TNR (back when it was far more liberal than today), and The New Yorker. Sometimes even semi-glossy monthlies like Look magazine delivered solid and honest reporting in depth.
Plus commercial radio network news did offer far fewer commercials (compared to today) and more actual news, with nationally broadcast political shows from D.C. (e.g., Capitol Cloakroom) being fairly commonly broadcast on the weekends. Finally, local tv news reporting in the big cities often delivered actual reporting of important local news and issues — as compared to the Eyewitless Slash-n-Burn local news of today.
Which is all to say people back then, the typical citizen or above-average one anyway, probably was more in the habit of reading the paper plus a little radio plus watching the evening news plus maybe at least one substantive magazine subscription. Today, the typical person is much more likely to watch tv exclusively or substantially for the news, with online reading supplementing that.
I do think that today — with the citizen-blogosphere and a few shows on Msnbc and now Current TV and Keith — we have many more avenues on a daily basis for at least skeptical opinionating about the political scene and about the MSM’s reporting about the news. I think we still lack a citizen alternative to the corp media’s ability to fund and air original basic reporting.
“It’s a chicken and egg kind of question.”
Funny, when I saw the title of the post in my RSS reader, that was my very first thought, before I even opened the article.
it’s the state of permament outrage that i find so wearisome and hard to maintain…the FDL’ers have been getting more and more extreme and i just want to be done with the political BS for while. much healthier to find a creative outlet (like music) and try to forget that we are totally fucked and it’s unlikely to change anytime soon.
Yep, permanent outrage is not sustainable. It makes you physically and mentally ill. I had to stop watching KO a couple of years ago because getting pissed off every weeknight ruined my digestion and disturbed my sleep patterns.
I’ve gotten where I now skip the news some days. It all just fills me with despair and a feeling of helplessness. My outlet is writing SF&F and I don’t even care that much if it ever gets published. I create an imaginary universe in my mind that I control… dammit.
Nice – keep up the writing and hopefully some of it will get published. my music is a similar outlet. i hear ya on the health issues, it’s been a rough few years for me too…not that I can blame that on dubya or the corrosive political environment, but the stress of observing our slow motion train wreck for people who really care, it’s gotta be a factor.
Chris Mooney has been doing a series of posts on bias ‘freeze’ from a science standpoint that have been eye opening.
Boo-
You’re not one of them. We have misinformation on the Left as well as they have Fox on the Right. Think Hamsher, Aravosis, etc. There are people who will stop at nothing to make a buck and they prey on the unstable who wish to be misinformed. Maybe some people just have an addiction to rage. If the Righty-crazies were to experience the second-coming of Christ, they’d probably call him a hippy traitor left-wing fake-ass plant and assassinate him. If the Lefty-crazies were to finally elect their ultimate liberal leader with all of the answers and the ability to create a liberal utopia in America, they would probably hate him/her because s/he’s not working hard enough for their pet cause and assassinate him/her for being a phony-ass right-wing plant because happiness is just not possible in their minds.
You at least try to see the forest for the trees. We know the difference. We sleep well at night with your analysis and of course that’s why no one pays you tons of money. You just can’t generate the controversy like the phonies do. Consider it a compliment and enjoy your life of poverty.
adios.
vigorously, on many issues, in fact, I think he’s a total ass on many central facts, central dogmas, if you will, he remains rather central to discussions in a David Brooksian sense. He is the online David Brooks. I will throw money his way just to see what argument is coming my way.
I’ve been reading booman for years, many years, and I never tho’t I’d be saying this. He still really wants to suck up to fucking Obama and the democrats. Brain damage, my friends. Adios.
I’m sure the WH is thrilled with my position on the War Powers Resolution and loved my advice on Libya.
But, whatever. Your fundamental misunderstanding is that I place one thing highest on my list of priorities, and that is in fighting the right. That has always been the case, and it will always be the case. And if you want to read someone who is primarily interested in some specific issue, you’re going to prefer someone else.
Issues are important, but I can’t think of a single issue where I prefer the Republicans. Not one.
There are some areas where the libertarians have a better position than mainstream Democrats, but I can’t say that about the Republicans. They’re hateful and extremely dangerous, not to mention aggressively stupid.
So, I while I’m quite willing to be critical of Democrats and the president, that’s never going to be my main purpose.
To answer your basic question: Having observed them at close range, Faux News viewers start out stupid/damaged or they wouldn’t be attracted to that garbage in the first place. The real danger is the ubiquity of this source. It’s replaced CNN on the screens in waiting rooms, bars, etc. So even people who haven’t chosen the source get contaminated.
Sometimes this is funny: I’ve been in doctor’s waiting room where the people yelled at the Faux news people & called them liars. That made me feel good. Maybe some of their viewers just love to hate on them.
And a daily diet of outrage even made the stupid/damaged guy at the auto repair shop switch from Fox to watching some business channel. He explained they report news but they don’t get as upset about it.
“They both are trying to feed the same thing: permanent outrage. It’s like an addiction, and their audience tunes in for a fix.
But, what am I saying? I’m in the same business. I guess I don’t want to buy what I’m selling.”
Any progressive blogger who isn’t tied into some larger organizing effort risks being a mimic of the corporate media model.
Al Giordano has had some of the best insights into this. He calls it poutrage:
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/banality-outrage
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/white-kids-poutrage
A friend of mine’s mother-in-law is a lifelong Democrat, in her 80s. She watches Fox News, only Fox, because, she says, they don’t confuse her with complexity. Their “news” stories are simple, no shades of gray, they are repeated. So, in her case, the answer to Boo’s question is – no, she started out stupid.
BTW, I really didn’t want to use the word stupid, because it is pretty rude. But some people are intellectually capable of dealing with a complex world, and some are simply frustrated by it. Fox fills their need for a world that makes sense, even though Fox lies.
The unrelenting repetition on Fox serves to make people believe they’ve learned something.
First of all, you are seriously stereotyping the FoxNews audience. Most of the folks I know go to FoxNews out of previous ideological commitments. There is a significant number of mostly homebound elderly who watch FoxNews all day, but younger folks who watch FoxNews don’t fit your stereotype around here.
Second, your stereotype minimizes the task that folks wanting more objective coverage have in (1) determining what is objective and (2) making that news salient to people without playing on fear, greed, or anger.
This problem did not begin with FoxNews. Britt Hume was a White House correspondent for a major network, for example. David Gregory, who still is on NBC, was the White House correspondent, who after a small plane flew into the White House in the Clinton era, pointed to a window and said that had the the plane hit there it would have hit the residence part of the White House.
And you had a press uncomfortable in the 1960s will telling more about the Vietnam War than battlefield reporting. (Dan Rather dodged bullets as a Vietnam correspondent; something not Fox anchor or reporter has done.) Only in 1968 or 1969 when Walter Cronkite said what by then most Americans thought did the news media become interested in digging deeper.
And serious Americans have bought outright frauds before. Joe McCarthy’s list of however many he felt at the moment Communists were working in the State Department, for example. The hands of coverage of Richard Nixon’s smearing of Helen Gahagan Douglas. The complicity of many local news outlets in the fabrication of stories to defend segregation. A lot of otherwise level-headed thinking people were taken in.
The issue with FoxNews is who has the legitimacy with the FoxNews audience to say what the truth is. FoxNews is defrauding the American people and destroying the very liberties it pretends to be supporting. It is the vengeance that Roger Ailes is being allowed to exact on an America that almost prosecuted the Reagan administration for Iran-Contra. And it is being financed for the purpose of lowering or eliminating Rupert Murdoch’s taxes.
maybe you underestimate just how savagely vicious Fox News programming is. No one wants to be exposed to that, let alone enjoys it, unless they have serious problems.
I think that the truth is “how savagely visious FoxNews programming has become.” I’ve watched as my otherwise sane and responsible friends, who in no way fit the sterotypes of the FoxNews viewer, have been drawn gradually deeper into the crazy as FoxNews has gotten crazier. Folks who a decade ago were against wasteful government spending now believe that all government spending is wasteful, but in the case of the police, prisons, and military we have to do it. Folks who I could have a political conversation with a decade ago can no longer participate in political discussion without trying to dominate the conversation.
If Fox, Rush, and all that propaganda machine disappeared tomorrow, I expect that in about a year they would be restored to the opinions they held a decade ago. And regain their ability to be reasoned with on politics.
It is the intentional creation of an ideological cult supported by round-the-clock reinforcement to hold that cult in being that is the issue. I don’t think that at this point pain or pleasure enters into it for these people. It is a matter of faith, commitment, and fixation on FoxNews’s escalating craziness.
See this article from the New York Times on how people use reason in politics. It notes in part: “Reasoning doesn’t have this function of helping us get to better beliefs and make better decessions….
It evolved to help us convince others … Truth and accuracy are beside the point“
I find shows that are mostly about clever ways of saying that conservatives are idiots boring (KO, Politically Incorrect) and never watch them. But most people on both the left and right eat them up. They provide witty argument for viewers that in turn are used by them in the personal lives.
Most people are pretty uninterested in examining their own beliefs. They are mostly interested in finding new ways to support the ones they already have.
I tend to agree with you on this with these exceptions.
I could be suffering from old-folks-those-were-the-good-old-days syndrome but: I believe people were better informed in the 50’s-60’s. In addition to Cronkite, there was Huntley-Brinkley and Hugh Downs did a morning show & specials on issues. All of these news providers & opinionators used calm, reasonable voices. There were a few weekly & monthly news magazines, daily newspapers–you could pick a liberal-slanted one or a right-leaner or read them both–they agreed on basic facts. They didn’t just make shit up or ignore what they didn’t like. I mean, the Civil Rights Movement was a “revolution” or an “evolution” but both sides reported real events as they happened.
I recall my conservative-leaning father having discussions with his liberal-leaning brother. They discussed; they didn’t shout at each other with slogans and think-tank engineered talking points.
I think sometimes we old-timers miss some of the personalities of yesteryear. Cronkite, that deep, resonant and authoritative voice. Brinkley of the 60s (not of the 80s and later corporate This Week) — the dry delivery but with that occasional playful raised eyebrow that suggested he knew something more than what he was reading. Hugh Downs — well, an affable sidekick for, iirc, Jack Paar and his late-night NBC show.
Some of us also miss that sense of togetherness we’d get when the networks would all broadcast, gavel to gavel, both parties’ conventions, or the occasional important senate hearings (1966 and 68 on VN for instance) or Watergate of course. There was no cable alternative to get away from it and, unless you lived in a big city with indy station alternatives, your only tv choice was to watch the convention/hearing on ABC or CBS or NBC. Frustrating for some, for sure, but for the rest of us it helped us stay informed and fed our political hunger.
Agree– many more political discussions happening w/n families and out in public than I perceive happening today. Not always calm and reasonable discussions though, at least from what I recall. Things like the VN War tended to bring out the emotions in people …
I miss Edward R. Murrow and his courage more than any of that era.
I think we probably have a slightly skewed perspective on how well informed people might have been back in the good-old days. Certainly, on the major issues of those days, it was much more likely to at least have common sources of information, with at least some variety in views based on the programs you regularly watched on television, the particular editorial content of the newspaper you happened to read and the magazines to which you subscribed. After all, confirmation bias was as strong back then as it is today.
Today we have worldwide cable networks and talk radio blaring the most extreme views imaginable right in our faces round the clock. Extremism like this was virtually undetectable on the normal person’s radar screen during those days. Today, you can get blasted with the most vile rhetoric right from the screen on the gas pump while you’re filling your tank, waiting for your coffee at Starbucks or sitting in your local coffee shop. They are ubiquitous in our day to day lives.
Many of us have simply adopted these purveyors of extremism as parts of our social groups and carried them right into our own homes and given them a seat at the table like they are a close family member. It’s no wonder that civility and the ability to have rational and calm conversations about differences of opinion, even within immediate family’s, is almost impossible in many cases.
The Overton Window has shifted dramatically in the last few decades. Extremism has been mainstreamed in many parts of the country.
Largely agree with this take. Certainly, while there were far more newspapers and print publications of substance, for the most part, with some notable exceptions, the substance was the same, only in longer format compared to today. Like substance and like political thinking: 80% of the newspapers in the land, iirc, endorsed Nixon over JFK in 1960 for instance. Eight yrs later, about that same % again endorsed Dick over his Dem opponent.
In the electronic media, the Fairness Doctrine I think largely checked tv/radio stations from giving it all over to extremist or unfairly biased points of views, 24/7, with no opportunity for rebuttal, as is the case today wrt many RW talk radio stations. One time though, NBC News aired a real hatchet job, in 1967, on New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison re his investigation into Dallas, but he cried foul and got a favorable FCC ruling which granted him equal time in prime time, which he took. Only time — iirc — that the FD was invoked successfully at least against a national tv network. (his brilliant rebuttal response, speaking right into the camera with no teleprompter, is available for viewing on YT).
On the radio airwaves, it wasn’t stations running wall-to-wall RW propaganda, but billionaire H.L. Hunt (John Birch and LBJ backer) did fund two nationally syndicated far-right opinion shows which went out over hundreds of stations. And on prime time tv in the big cities, the independent stations would run RW hosts like Joe Pyne (one of the first RW radio hosts in the US), a real nasty piece of work in any era, but in SF and LA and presumably elsewhere he would be balanced by a moderate or liberal voice on the next issues-oriented show, such as Mort Sahl or Louis Lomax.
And of course then, as today, certain topics or opinions were considered taboo — such as advocacy of conspiracy as being behind the JFK, MLK or RFK killings — and so (unless ordered by the FCC…) such discussions were relegated to late-night/middle-of-the-night radio or tv talk shows. The first national tv broadcast of the Zapruder film, for instance, didn’t happen until 1975 — 12 yrs after the fact — at about 2 am, on Geraldo’s old Good Night America show on ABC. (back when Geraldo was an unabashed liberal and didn’t wallow each night in tabloid muck.)