Big surprise
By Here’s another way to look at the misinformation: In our poll, 72% of self-identified FOX News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79% of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69% think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75% believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly. But it would be incorrect to suggest that this is ONLY coming from conservative viewers who tune in to FOX. In fact, 41% of CNN/MSNBC viewers believe the misinformation about illegal immigrants, 39% believe the government takeover stuff, 40% believe the abortion misperception, and 30% believe the stuff about pulling the plug on grandma. What’s more, a good chunk of folks who get their news from broadcast TV (NBC, ABC, CBS) believe these things, too.
There’s quite a lot of room, I’d say, between a “good chunk of folks” and — to describe the FOX numbers more accurately — the “gigantic motherfucking preponderance of folks” who believe things that are as demonstrably false as the existence of the Abominable Snowman. The gap is most likely a function of the difference between news outlets who (a) amplify factual errors by providing generous bandwidth to those arguing for the existence of Abominable Snowmen; and those who (b) promote, as a matter of editorial policy, the belief that Abominable Snowmen are going to rape and euthanize your grandmother.
Of course, if any of that sounds familiar, it should:
Fox is the most consistently significant predictor of misperceptions [about the rationale and immediate aftermath of the Iraq War]. Those who primarily watched Fox were 2.0 times more likely to believe that close links to al Qaeda have been found, 1.6 times more likely to believe that WMD had been found, 1.7 times more likely to believe that world public opinion was favorable to the war, and 2.1 times more likely to have at least one misperception.
Why oh why can’t we have a — oh, never mind.