Pretty much what most people already knew. But with data!Follow

No, the article attempts to convince the public that reading/watching FOX news makes a person misinformed, the corroborating evidence being that Fox News presents misinformation, misleading statements, and "opinions" (generally blatant lies) as factual news.

see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB8F7gWHapQ&NR=1
http://mediamatters.org/research/200909290040
http://mmfafactcheck.blogspot.com/2010/11/mmfa-smears-fox-news-on-tax-cuts-and.html
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/10/patriot-act-reform-continues
http://www.newshounds.us/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/20/the-ten-most-egregious-fo_n_327140.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rqdtZlec0s
http://www.spitefulcritic.com/home/10-most-ridiculous-fox-news-lies-creative-edits-and-half-truths

If the study was something like "the correlation between autism and living next to highways" you could reasonable claim that those aren't necessarily causal as there are a lot of other 2ndary associations that could be the actual source of difference (poorer people probably live closer to highways, which in turn influences diet, residence quality, access to health care, education, social factors, 2ndary environmental factors etcetc).

However, if the study is "did the guy we gave the wrong time and location for the party show up at the wrong time and location?", you'd have to be out of your mind to believe there isn't a causal relationship there.

Sigh...

Because it's the summary that incorrectly restates the questions in order to make an argument that is unsupported by the data.

How many times do I have to explain this? The data does not say that "fox news viewers are more likely to get the answers wrong". It doesn't. The article says that, and massively manipulates the data in order to make that argument. It counts on most people being unable to distinguish the difference.



Yes. I'm well aware of that. And the article misstates those questions when making their argument about a specific subset of the poll respondents. Surely you see how that's relevant.



Boy do you not understand how editorial propaganda works. Let me give you a hint: The purpose of the editorial is not just to get people to think Fox News lies, and that viewers of Fox News are misinformed and stupid.

It is also about reinforcing other false views in the minds of those who read it. See, you laugh at how some group you already don't like is so stupid. But along the way, what did the article just do? It reinforced the assumption that the statement "health reform law will increase the deficit" is wrong.

The people who write these things know how to write in ways that influence how people think about a given topic. It's what they do professionally. No word change they make is accidental. A thinking person should be able to look at the word changes that are made and figure out *why* they are made. It's not even hard, but most people don't ever bother to engage their brain when reading.

Don't just read the surface. Think about what is being written and why the author wrote it the way he/she did.

You don't really know anything about polling or statistical analysis methodology, I'm guessing.

You're wrong.

At absolute worst, the article gently mischaracterizes what the study data shows, and overstates its case by suggesting a causal relationship where only a correlation is present (from which we can infer causality).

I know you don't want to believe the results, but you haven't described any valid flaws beyond what I just pointed out. Instead, you want to seem to change the subject to discuss the way the editorial was written. Look, it's obviously an editorial. Nobody reading it should be confused that the author is conveying a personal opinion just because they include some facts to support it. Any highschooler (even in public school!) learns this.

Yes, you are. And poorly at that.

I know enough about polling and statistical analysis to know that if you take a poll with a given desired sample size, and then attempt to correlate responses to a subset of one response (17% in this case), and then correlate them further down to those who responded differently to several other questions (those who viewed Fox news exclusively requires this sort of math), you are going to get a sample size that is far far too small to be useful for anything at all.

Um... I also know that it's easy to lie with statistics, doubly so with statistics based on interpreting survey data. This particular case is just such a ridiculously blatant example of it, that I'm not sure why anyone is taking it even remotely seriously. I can only conclude that since the article says something which some of you like to hear, that you're willing to completely ignore the methodology and accept it as truth.




You listening to yourself? "Gently mischaracterize"? Really?



How about that we have to trust the same people/person who "gently mischaracterizes" virtually every single survey question in a clearly biased manner, that they did honest, unbiased, and mathematically/statistically correct work on the data itself to derive their results. Since we don't have access to the correlated data in terms of which answers aligned with which, we can't ourselves look at the data and repeat their math. We're required to take their word on it.

Um... Call me crazy, but my tendency is to *not* accept the methodology of someone who so consistently manages to re-write survey questions to make them mean something completely different than the original question. I'm going to suspect that they did just as much fudging when deciding which ones were "Fox News Viewers" in order to get the results they wanted.

That's a guess of course, but in the absence of any evidence at all that said author is anything other than a biased hack, why should I assume otherwise? Certainly, only a complete fool would accept such a clearly mistake ridden work as fact. Yet, some of you are. Think about that.


If this article said something you didn't agree with, and used the exact same methodology and "gentle mischaracterizations" would you accept it? Doesn't it speak volumes about *you* that you accept it here?




Lol. Read the title of the thread. Clearly, some people *are* confused.

Edited, Dec 17th 2010 2:58pm by gbaji

Take a few classes and try again. What you "know" is wrong.

It is possible to make statistical analysis in an extremely large sample size say pretty much whatever you want, but not with the level of statistical significance you want, and not in the way you think. It's not EASY to do, and unless you're talking to someone who doesn't know any better, you're not likely to be able to pull one over on them, either. It's the kind of obvious thing that anyone reviewing your study would stop and question, "Uh, why would you do it that way?"



And I can only conclude that since the article says something which some of you don't like to hear, that you're willing to completely ignore the methodology and accept it as false.



Oh, clearly. Only not the people you think.

No, it's not.



Yes, it's "possible", but not in this case. I don't recall the sample size, but it wasn't "extremely large". It was "large enough" to provide relatively accurate results regarding the largest groupings they might use (people who voted, people who voted DEM, and people who voted GOP). You could probably get away with things like ethnicity and gender.

Their correlation is either completely arbitrary (since they didn't discount people who got their news from sources other than Fox News), or it's almost certainly to small (trying to identify only people who used Fox, while excluding those who used all other sources). There's kinda no way around that.



Um... But you didn't ask that question, did you? Do you think some magical organization exists who review some hack writing an editorial? Is there some stamp on the article showing that the conclusions within were reviewed for accuracy by some known non-partisan statistical data reviewing group? No?

Then why the hell do you trust the article?



Except that I'm not ignoring the methodology. I'm looking at it and saying that it smells. Badly.


Um... There's also a difference between saying that something is true, and observing that said claim isn't supported sufficiently to be acceptable as true. I don't know if Fox News viewers really are less informed (or more misinformed) than other people. What I do know is that this article doesn't show any data which should be accepted one way or another.

Edited, Dec 17th 2010 3:21pm by gbaji

It doesn't exclusively say what I think it does (specifically, the last section goes off on a different tangent). However, it absolutely does speak specifically to the well documented and studied fact that journalists do apply bias in their stories all the time. It happens to get ignored because the data shows that the overwhelming bias is in favor of liberal ideas and politicians and those who are most in the position to inform the public about this are the very same media outlets who are guilty of this behavior in the first place.

You asked what would happen if journalists applied the same kind of bias that is present in the editorial linked earlier in this thread in their non-editorial reports, and I showed that this does happen with alarming regularity. It just doesn't happen in a way and a direction that you want to condemn, so you pretend it doesn't exist. Your starting assumption is that it's always just conservatives who do this, so you refuse to accept evidence pointing in the other direction. You accept an incredibly hacked up editorial claiming that a conservative news source misinforms their viewers, but dismiss out of hand numerous studies showing consistent liberal bias among main stream media outlets.


When do you start to question your assumption? Ever?

I find this amusing since I doubt you know me from any other poster on these boards.

The rest of your post was the same inane argument about how your methods are superior to everyone else's, so I won't bother responding to it.

Huh? Did you read the link? It was an editorial, which provided factual data showing that Fox News was more balanced in its news coverages than any other network. Um... The half page press release (you must have absolutely *huge* pages) is for a study that was done. There's even a tab at the top of the linked page with "studies" where you can look up all of the information you want.

Of course, you'd have to be willing to look at data which might just challenge your assumptions first.


The information on the page I linked (and the pages that page links to) is pretty accurate. At least it's vastly more accurate than the page linked to that started this thread. Are you challenging any of the claims being made? Do you dispute that 57% of the McCain stories were negative and only 14% positive, while Obama's were 29% and 36% respectively? Do you not think there's a problem with that, or that this represents some indication of media bias? Why not?

Do you disagree with the statement that in the second study, they found that ABC, CBS, and NBC collectively portrayed the Dem ticket in 2008 positively 65% of the time and negatively 35% of the time and portrayed the GOP ticket positively 31% and negatively 69% of the time? Do you disagree with the finding that Fox News, in contrast, portrayed the Dems positively 28% and negatively 72%, while portraying the GOP positively 39% and negatively 61% of the time?

Those aren't made up numbers. Those are findings in studies. And not findings gleaned by doing some really bizarre tricks with the numbers in ways that the original collected data doesn't support, but actually using the collected data as intended via the methodology used to collect said data.


And this is not new. I could probably find a half dozen or so different media analysis studies done over the last decade or so, every single one of which finds that the broadcast networks consistently lean left with their coverage, and that Fox News, despite being labeled as biased continually, actually presents a much much more balanced coverage than any other news outlet.



I'm not the one who's assumptions fly completely in the face of every single study ever done on the subject at hand. It's laughable. It's like you're just wallowing in your own ignorance here. Are you even aware that there are a number of organizations out there that do studies about media bias? Have you ever read their results? They're pretty consistently the same. And they pretty consistently show significant liberal leaning bias in the broadcast networks and a far more balanced view on Fox News.


Which I'm sure is why you've never heard of or read any of these studies. No sense burdening you with facts which might just make you question the dogma you've been fed.

Who do you expect me to believe? Me, who is educated on the subject and knows what he's talking about? Or you, who is obviously full of sh*t and has provided no evidence of understanding the subject?

I'd respect you a lot more if you'd just admit that this is something you don't really know about, but that you pretend to when you obviously don't makes you less of a fool and more of a charlatan.



The STUDY was conducted through the University of Maryland. If you had any experience at the research level of academia, you would understand why. Studies are reviewed MANY times before (usually by everyone on the project and several of their colleagues who have expertise on the subject) they're even submitted to anyone else, who may then FURTHER thoroughly review it. A quick glance at the board of advisors should tell anyone who knows anything about research that this project (hell, even the fact that it's a project means some serious sh*t) was executed very thoroughly.

This could have been an opportunity to learn something that you didn't know, but instead you decided to bluff (very badly). Or I don't know, maybe you just really think you're that smart, that you actually know what you're talking about.

For those of you who are unable to appreciate just how obviously wrong gbaji is on this subject, this would be like going to a medical doctor and arguing with him that your pack-a-day smoking isn't contributing to your emphysema.



Well the study does, and the article is reporting on the study accurately (save your semantic quibbling).



There's a huge difference between bias and misinformation. I'm not even going to begin touching on what other things are wrong with the point you were trying to make, because that pretty much settles it.

Edited, Dec 17th 2010 8:48pm by Kachi