webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

Politifact

==

see poynter inst

?

https://www.mediamatters.org/politifact/politifacts-trump-o-meter-embarrassing-encapsulation-problem-modern-media

COMRADE KAMALA: The Communist Candidate – The First TV

cernovich

jk media goes along w/ aparatchiks

politifact says walz did not dodge deploy

langford rino grabs ankles for commies?!

---

PolitiFact Founder Explains the “Epidemic of Lying” in American Politics | Amanpour and Company

no left symmetry b/c dems do not believe it helps them , still have shame, vs post gingrich anything goes; gop donor will congrat on caught le by attaboy stick to libs/dems/media, winning is all

PolitiFact Founder Explains the “Epidemic of Lying” in American Politics | Amanpour and Company

Amanpour and Company

465K subscribers

151,242 views Oct 16, 2024 #amanpourpbs

As Americans gear up for the election, Bill Adair warns of an "epidemic of lying" in U.S. politics -- particularly within the Republican Party. Adair joins the show to discuss his new book "Beyond the Lie." As founder of the fact-checking website PolitiFact, Adair is well placed to account for where disinformation comes from, how it spreads and the danger it poses to democracy.

Originally aired on October 16, 2024

April 21, 2022

:{:(style="outline:none;box-sizing:inherit;padding-left:5px;padding-right:5px;display:inline-block;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal"):}::{:(style="outline:none;box-sizing:inherit;padding-left:5px;padding-right:5px;display:inline-block;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal"):}: :{:(style="outline:none;box-sizing:inherit;padding-left:5px;padding-right:5px;display:inline-block;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-weight:900;font-stretch:normal"):}:

A new anti-vaccine documentary ridiculously claims that the coronavirus is not a virus, but a synthetic version of snake venom that evil forces are spreading through remdesivir, the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and drinking water to “make you a hybrid of Satan.”

The 48-minute film, released April 11, is the latest in an expanding genre of mega-viral, conspiracy-laden videos made in the mold of the “Plandemic” video from May 2020. Its title, “Watch the Water,” is a nod to a favorite refrain of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which is centered around the belief that a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is running a global sex-trafficking ring.

The video is an interview between far-right radio host Stew Peters, who has a history of using inflammatory rhetoric and spreading COVID-19 conspiracy theories, and Bryan Ardis, a former chiropractor who built a brand around claiming that the drug remdesivir is killing people.

It showed Ardis, who sells acne products and is now using the film to sell what he calls “anti-v” supplement kits online, invoking the Garden of Eden story and a fictional TV show plot as he outlined an elaborate mass-murder scheme that he claimed involves even the pope.

“I think the plan all along was to get the serpent’s, the evil one’s DNA into your God-created DNA,” Ardis said. “They’re using mRNA, which is mRNA extracted from, I believe, the king cobra venom, the king cobra venom. And I think they want to get that venom inside of you and make you a hybrid of Satan.”

The video’s theory is “miles from reality, and indicates a profound lack of understanding in science and medicine, and much twisted logic,” said Dr. David Relman, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University. “There is no evidence whatsoever that SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 is caused by snakes or snake venom.”

(PolitiFact)

Some members of the anti-vaccine and QAnon movements met Ardis’ venom claims with skepticism. But Peters promoted the film widely on the messaging app Telegram, and it racked up nearly 3 million views on Rumble, a video hosting platform, in the week after its release. Social media users shared it across other mainstream platforms, where it was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

COVID-19 is not snake venom

Early in the documentary, Ardis told Peters he first started investigating a potential link between COVID-19 and snake venom after he received a cryptic text from an unnamed doctor asking, “If you got bit by a rattlesnake, would you go to a hospital and get antivenom?”

The text, Ardis claimed, came in shortly after he had done an interview about the monoclonal antibodies used to treat COVID-19 infections, so that got him thinking.

He falsely claimed that the monoclonal antibodies are identical to the anti-venoms used to disable the toxins from a snake bite. He then claimed without evidence that if a public health agency advises against a treatment, then that means the treatment actually works.

The Food and Drug Administration in January recommended limiting the use of monoclonal antibodies as COVID-19 treatments after they were shown to be less effective against the newer variants. So Ardis reasoned that if the FDA was discouraging the use of monoclonal antibodies, and if monoclonal antibodies were anti-venoms, then the coronavirus must actually be venom.

“I realized all of a sudden that monoclonal antibodies are anti-venom,” Ardis said. “The federal government doesn’t want us using anti-venom. Why are they bashing anti-venom, and why are we finding anti-venom works against COVID? Is it not a virus? Is it a venom?”

The answer, experts said, is no.

The monoclonal antibodies used for COVID-19 infections “do not recognize or bind to snake venom,” Relman said. “They have nothing whatsoever to do with snake venom.”

Anti-venoms are developed by injecting venom into an animal with a robust immune system, such as a horse, and harvesting the antibodies the animal produces in response.

Monoclonal antibodies are different. They are lab-produced, or cloned, and designed to boost protection against a specific target like the coronavirus. No monoclonal antibodies have been created yet to target snake venoms, said Dr. Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University.

Flimsy evidence

The coronavirus has been isolated, replicated, sequenced, imaged and studied as it has worked its way across the globe, killing over 6 million people. Scientists have no doubt that it’s a virus.

But Ardis suggested, for example, that a University of Pittsburgh researcher who was shot dead in May 2020 was killed because he was going to reveal that COVID-19 was snake venom.

The university told PolitiFact that those allegations are “incorrect and not scientifically valid.” Police said the incident was unrelated to the researcher’s work.

Ardis also cited several studies. He pointed to one early-pandemic study that considered snakes as a COVID-19 reservoir, but Garry said its findings were “very speculative” and “pretty quickly rejected.”

Ardis misrepresented a second study, falsely claiming that it showed an enzyme from rattlesnake venom in the blood of COVID-19 patients. In reality, the study found that an enzyme healthy humans already have in their bodies — which is similar but not identical to an enzyme in rattlesnake venom — was circulating at elevated levels in patients who died of COVID-19.

Ardis then described a third study in a way that was “not only disturbing and outrageous but is absolutely incorrect,” said Gus Wright of Texas A&M University, one of the study’s co-authors.

The study mapped the genetic makeup of the Indian cobra and, to help develop a more effective anti-venom, identified 19 venom toxins that are specific to that snake.

Ardis implied that the 19 toxins were related to COVID-19, but Wright said the study “in no way has any association with COVID-19.” The 19 in COVID-19 reflects the year it was discovered, 2019.

“He seems to grab at phrases and fragments of findings and then weave them into a distorted picture,” Relman said.

Toward the end of the film, Ardis went so far as to claim that the phrase “coronavirus pandemic” can translate in Latin to “the pope’s venom pandemic” or “king cobra venom pandemic.”

Those interpretations are “completely false,” said Massimo Cè, a lexicographer at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, the world’s largest dictionary of Latin. Coronaviruses have been known to scientists by that name for decades, Cè said, and the term itself traces back centuries to the Latin word used to describe the halo of light seen around the sun and the moon.

Evil forces aren’t envenomating people through remdesivir, vaccines and water

Ardis claimed that evil forces are targeting people with the snake venom through remdesivir, vaccines and drinking water, since venom is a secretion that can’t spread as a respiratory virus.

His supposed proof included the observation that both remdesivir and snake venom have “a white-to-yellowish tint” when stored, he said. He also referenced debunked videos in which social media users claimed the vaccines made them magnetic, and that tap water tests positive for COVID-19. And he showed a clip from a fictional TV show in which a character was poisoned through his drink. Ardis said after he watched the episode, “I realized how they’ve been spreading this.”

But Gilead, the manufacturer of remdesivir, said Ardis’ claims about the drug containing snake venom and causing mass deaths were “entirely false.”

Remdesivir is “definitely not venom from a snake,” said Dr. Katherine Seley-Radtke, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

The drug’s structure has been repeatedly confirmed as what scientists classify as a “nucleoside analogue,” Seley-Radtke said, while snake venom is “a complex mixture of all sorts of things.”

Pfizer also told PolitiFact that its mRNA vaccine is “entirely synthetic and does not contain any animal products.” Ingredient lists for COVID-19 vaccines are public.

The U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the coronavirus has not been detected in drinking water, either. The creator of the fictional TV show that Ardis cited told FactCheck.org that the poisoning scene, which aired in 2017, was not meant to foreshadow the pandemic or the nefarious plot Ardis described.

“This would require a massive conspiracy of scientists, public health officials, etc., in countries all over the world,” Garry said. “The claims are wildly inaccurate.”

Our ruling

Ardis said COVID-19 is a synthetic version of “snake venom” that evil forces are spreading through remdesivir, drinking water and the COVID-19 vaccines to “make you a hybrid of Satan.”

That’s a far cry from reality, experts said. COVID-19 is not snake venom.

The former chiropractor relied on a mix of misrepresented scientific studies, twisted logic, fictional TV show plotlines, botched Latin, debunked home videos, circumstantial evidence and what he claimed were signs from God to stake his case.

We rate his statement Pants on Fire!

This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact, which is part of the Poynter Institute. It is republished here with permission. See the sources for this fact check here and more of their fact checks here.

sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) is being lambasted by fact-checkers yet again for circulating false claims. A new piece published by The Houston Chronicle's Laura Schulte lays out the remarks made by the Republican senator and fact-checkers rebuttal torching his baseless claims.

This particular ordeal centers on Johnson's January 26, 2022, appearance on "The Charlie Kirk Show." At the time, Johnson and Kirk discussed COVID vaccines.

"We’ve heard story after story. All these athletes dropping dead on the field," he said during a conversation about the possible adverse effects of COVID vaccines. "But we’re supposed to ignore that. Nothing happening here, nothing to see. This is a travesty, this is a scandal."

Schulte immediately zeroed in on Johnson's exaggerated claim about athletes "dropping dead on the field."

"Is Johnson right?" Schulte asked as she immediately followed with a sharp answer to the question with a resounding, "No."

She continued, "Let’s take a closer look."

In wake of Johnson's outlandish remarks, he was asked to provide evidence of his claim. His spokeswoman Vanessa Ambrosini reportedly told The Houston Chronicle that Johnson "has been alarmed by stories he has heard of athletes dying on the field."

"The Senator’s point in raising these issues," Ambrosini said via email, "has always been that our federal health agencies should be concerned about reports on adverse reactions related to COVID-19 vaccines and they should fully investigate and make their findings available to the American people."

While Schulte did acknowledge the validity of those remarks, she argued the specifics of Johnson's remarks. "The claim was that there are stories about all sorts of athletes dying in the midst of competition, or at least while practicing," she specified.

Although Johnson has a tendency to cite information from the federal database documenting adverse events, Schulte noted that "the database itself notes the claims are not vetted to establish a cause between them."

Patrick Remington —a former epidemiologist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and director for the preventive medicine residency program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison— offered a detailed explanation of what the CDC actually looks for: "causation, not just coincidence"

"The burden is on credible scientists to study whether vaccination could be associated with this outcome, and no credible science exists to say it is," he said. "We continue to do ongoing surveillance, the vaccine surveillance system is in place to study any possible associations that come up. But to date, I am not aware of any studies or any credible research that suggests that vaccines cause death in young athletes."

Ambrosini also provided a copy of an article published by GoodSciencing.com that suggests "hundreds" of young athletes have died as a result of vaccine complications. "We found no proof of a causal relationship in any of the cases between the vaccines and the injuries or deaths," the fact-check refuted Johnson's claim confirming there were 6 deaths.

Another fact check also broke the claim down. Schulte noted: "Days before Johnson took to the Charlie Kirk Show, former NBA All-Star John Stockton on Jan. 23 2022 claimed more than 100 professional athletes who were vaccinated have dropped dead "right on the pitch, right on the field, right on the court."

PolitiFact National along with a group of doctors, have also pushed back.

"PolitiFact National rated this False in a Jan. 26, 2022 fact-check. In it, Matthew Martinez, a sports cardiologist with the National Football League, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League and Major League Soccer and who is director of sports cardiology at Morristown Medical Center in New Jersey said he was not aware of a single COVID vaccine-related cardiac complication in professional sports."

The same report went on to address misinformation about the risk of myocarditis; a claim Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also misstated.

As for Johnson's false claim, The Houston Chronicle rated it as "false" and offered an explanation of why.

"There is also the obvious problem with those cases, as they relate to supporting Johnson’s claim, so far as that the two athletes are not, well, dead," Schulte wrote.

In conclusion, she wrote, "Finally, health experts have also said that no research shows the link between sudden death incidents in sports players and vaccines."

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/ron-johnson-s-vaccine-claims-busted-in-brual-fact-check/

plandemic

https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2020/heres-how-plandemic-went-viral/

https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/may/08/fact-checking-plandemic-documentary-full-false-con/

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/23/facebook-posts/no-democrats-arent-pushing-microchips-fight-corona/

For Erin Gallagher, the conspiratorial documentary “Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19” came to her attention like it did for myself — a question from her mom about the veracity of the 26-minute video full of coronavirus misinformation.

After hearing about it from more friends and family, Gallagher decided to investigate how the video went viral so quickly.

Gallagher, an independent social media researcher who has been featured in NBC News and Wired, analyzed 37,000 posts containing the word “plandemic” and 24,000 posts with the name “Judy Mikovits,” the former National Cancer Institute scientist whose work has been discredited, yet is the key expert in “Plandemic.”

Using graphs showing the Facebook groups where “Plandemic” was posted, along with the type of link users were sharing, she found a pipeline of how this video went viral: from YouTube to Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members and names like “Chemtrails Global Skywatch,” “OFFICIAL Q / QANON” and “Drain the Swamp.” YouTube links were the most commonly-shared access points for “Plandemic,” regardless of how quickly YouTube removed them.

“Everyone uses multiple platforms to varying degrees now so nothing is ever limited to just one or two,” Gallagher told me this weekend. “But in this case, YouTube hosted the video, and I suspect many mirrors of it once it started getting pulled down, and these large, highly-active Facebook groups were key to spreading it like wildfire and pushing it into all of our families’ Facebook feeds.”

In the “plandemic” keyword data, which was collected between April 8, and May 8, YouTube links posted on Facebook had nearly 200,000 likes and more than 150,000 each of shares and comments.

I reached out to YouTube and Facebook for comment but haven’t heard back. I will send an updated note with tomorrow’s newsletter if either company responds.

“‘Plandemic’ creators encouraged viewers to download the video from the documentary’s website and post it across video platforms,” said Alex Kaplan, senior researcher at the left-leaning Media Matters for America. “And you could see the impact: dozens of reuploads of the video on YouTube — even after they tried to remove the original — and shares of it on other platforms.”

[video 6 min ]

This isn’t the first YouTube-to-Facebook conspiracy video Kaplan has studied. He found some of the most-viewed YouTube videos touting the debunked claim that Bill Gates is pushing a coronavirus vaccine to microchip the public receiving thousands of engagements on Facebook. And a video calling COVID-19 a “false flag” drew 6 million views on YouTube and more than 1 million engagements on Facebook before it was removed. Both videos went viral over the last two months.

“Be really careful about sharing content coming from places you haven’t heard of before just because it gives you some kind of emotion,” Kaplan said. “Take the time to do some research on the person(s) behind it or the claims made in it, and see if someone, like a fact-checker, has debunked it, before sharing.”

Disclosure: Google.org, the charitable arm of Google, supports the MediaWise project with grant funding and Google is the parent company of YouTube. Facebook also supports MediaWise and its MediaWise Voter Project. MediaWise operates editorially independent of its funders like all work of The Poynter Institute (details here). More info about MediaWise can be found at poynter.org/mediawise.

---

Was Dr. Anthony Fauci on Microsoft’s board of directors?

Microsoft says Anthony Fauci never served on the company’s board. Read the fact-check»

===

mma 120

Judd Legum reported that Facebook is allowing a major pro-Trump Super PAC, the Committee to Defend the President, to “run ads with lies.”

“Since Saturday, the Committee to Defend the President is running multiple ads that claim former Vice President Joe Biden is ‘a criminal who used his power as Vice President to make him and his son RICH,’” according to Legum’s report.

According to Facebook's own fact-checking partners, this claim is false. PolitiFact and FactCheck.org, both fact-checking partners of Facebook, debunked Trump's suggestion previously.

Facebook’s ad policy specifically bans ads that have been debunked by third-party fact-checkers.

The social network has neglected to enforce the few rules that it has. Despite prohibiting attacks that target a group of people based on their immigration status, Facebook let Trump run over 2,000 ads in early 2019 referring to immigration to the United States as an “invasion,” which has long been a white supremacist talking point. Facebook also let Trump run hundreds of ads in April of 2019 that violated its policyabout “personal attributes” of users. And just today, CNN reported that Trump is running ads blatantly lying about the Super Bowl.

===

==

mma

Politico declared that the $93 trillion figure is "bogus" -- or, in an earlier version of the article published behind a firewall, "essentially vapor."

The fact-checking project PolitiFact also found the $93 trillion figure to be untrustworthy, calling it "only about as strong as a clothespin in high wind." It noted that "the [AAF] report itself is full of assumptions, qualifiers and caveats," and when a fact-checker reached out to Holtz-Eakin, the AAF president "made it clear to us that the report aims to provide very rough estimates on a plan that’s only partially developed." PolitiFact rated as "false" this claim from Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA): "At $93 trillion, the Green New Deal would cost more than the entire recorded spending of the U.S. since the Constitution went into effect in 1789."

Other journalists have also pointed out major problems with the AAF analysis. Paul Blest at Splinter noted that AAF used cost estimates for a universal jobs program ("$6.8 trillion to $44.6 trillion") and universal health care ("$36 trillion") that are vastly higher than estimates produced by other think tanks. AAF also failed to account for how much money programs like universal health care could save. According to Blest:

[AAF's] ballpark estimate on a federal jobs guarantee has a range of $38 trillion. The centrist Brookings Institution’s estimate last year, by the way, put the high end on a job guarantee at $543 billion a year, or $5.4 trillion over 10 years.

===

rww

, the Media Research Center will now be “fact-checking the fact-checkers”: “In an era of ‘fake news’ and inaccurate reporting, it is important now more than ever that the fact-checkers themselves are exposed for their biases. MRC routinely finds instances when fact-checkers bend the truth or disproportionately target conservatives. We are assigning our own rating to their judgments and will expose the worst offenders.”

==

==

Trump cast Democrats as supporters of MS-13 gang members and uninterested in fighting crime.

Trump routinely brings up brutal crimes committed by MS-13 members while highlighting his administration’s goal to incarcerate or deport them from the United States.

At the May 22 Susan B. Anthony List’s Campaign for Life Gala, Trump claimed Democrats want open borders and don’t want to stop illegal immigration.

"And the other day — just the other day — Nancy Pelosi came out in favor of MS-13," Trump said. "That’s the first time I’ve heard that. She wants them to be treated with respect, as do other Democrats."

Trump repeated the charge against House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on May 23 during a roundtable discussion on MS-13, saying: "I noticed recently where Democrats, Nancy Pelosi as an example, are trying to defend MS-13 gang members. I called them animals the other day and I was met with rebuke. They said, ‘they are people.’ They are not people. These are animals."

We wondered about Trump’s claim that Pelosi "came out in favor of MS-13" and that she has defended gang members. Trump distorted the facts.

Pelosi said "calling people animals is not a good thing," but did not focus her comments on MS-13 gang members.

Trump’s ‘animals’ remark

Trump made headlines earlier this month after labeling some people who come to the United States as "animals." His comment came during an immigration meeting with California officials.

While Trump did not specifically mention MS-13 gang members in the "animals" sentence, his statement came after a sheriff spoke about "bad guys" and MS-13 gang members. (Here’s the full context.)

Some interpreted Trump as saying all immigrants are "animals."

Trump went on Twitter May 18 to fight back that assessment: "Fake News Media had me calling Immigrants, or Illegal Immigrants, ‘Animals.’ Wrong! They were begrudgingly forced to withdraw their stories. I referred to MS 13 Gang Members as ‘Animals,’ a big difference - and so true. Fake News got it purposely wrong, as usual!" Trump tweeted.

What Pelosi said

Pelosi clearly chose the interpretation of Trump’s words at the roundtable that was least favorable to Trump. But that doesn’t mean she was embracing violent gang members.

At a May 17 press conference, the day after Trump’s "animals" comment, Pelosi said"calling people animals is not a good thing" and defended "undocumented immigrants." She did not mention MS-13 gang members.

Pelosi said "we're all God's children" and spoke about "a spark of divinity in every person on Earth."

"And so when the president of the United States says about undocumented immigrants, ‘These aren't people. These are animals,’ you have to wonder, does he not believe in the spark of divinity, the dignity and worth of every person? ‘These are not people. These are animals.’ The president of the United States," Pelosi said.

White House spokesman Steven Cheung said in an emailed statement, "Pelosi either is peddling an out-of-context quote that mainstream media outlets have corrected or retracted (AP and CNN), or defending MS-13 gang members whose motto is rape, control, and kill."

The White House said the "animals" term is language Trump has used before when talking about MS-13 gang members.

Still, Pelosi did not defend MS-13 gang members or come out in their favor, as Trump claimed. She centered her comments on "undocumented immigrants" and rebuked using the word "animals" to refer to people.

Our ruling

Trump said Pelosi "came out in favor of MS-13."

Trump’s claim is based on Pelosi’s criticism of Trump for using the word "animals" during an immigration meeting with California officials. Trump used that term after a sheriff spoke about MS-13 gang members.

A day after Trump’s comment, Pelosi said "calling people animals is not a good thing" and defended "undocumented immigrants." Pelosi did not mention MS-13 gang members in her comments.

While Trump blasted media reports and others for missing the context of his remarks, he did just that with Pelosi’s comment. We rate it False.

==

http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/

Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States on Nov. 8, 2016. He has been a real estate developer, entrepreneur and host of the NBC reality show, "The Apprentice."  Trump's statements were awarded PolitiFact's 2015 Lie of the Year. Born and raised in New York City, Trump is married to Melania Trump, a former model from Slovenia. Trump has five children and eight grandchildren. Three of his children, Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric, serve as executive vice presidents of the Trump Organization.

The PolitiFact scorecard

True14 (4%)(14)

Mostly True38 (11%)(38)

Half True51 (15%)(51)

Mostly False63 (18%)(63)

False114 (33%)(114)

Pants on Fire62 (18%)(62)

Donald Trump's website

==

On November 16, PolitiFact ruled that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' remark that "climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism" is "mostly false." But while Sanders arguably overstated how "direct" the connection is between climate change and terrorism, his broader point that the two are linked is well substantiated, as PolitiFact itself noted when it rated a similar statement from fellow Democrat Martin O'Malley. Nonetheless, PolitiFact gave Sanders the same "mostly false" rating it has given to Republican politicians and fossil fuel industry allies who deny that man-made climate change is even occurring.

Foreign policy and military experts agree with Sanders' assessment that climate change helps create the conditions for terrorism to thrive, and major studies and reports have detailed how global warming played an important role in the rise of ISIS. In particular, climate change likely worsened drought conditions in Syria, which in turn helped spark that country's civil war, allowing ISIS to seize territory and establish a base of operations. PolitiFact noted many of these same facts when it assessed a remark by O'Malley and ruled that it was "mostly true" that "the cascading effects" of climate change contributed to the rise of ISIS.

However, PolitiFact took issue with Sanders' use of the word "directly" when he said at a November 14 Democratic presidential debatethat "climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism":

SANDERS: [C]limate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism. And if we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say you're gonna see countries all over the world-- this is what the C.I.A. says, they're gonna be struggling over limited amounts of water, limited amounts of land to grow their crops. And you're gonna see all kinds of international conflict.

PolitiFact rated Sanders' comment as "mostly false," writing: "While there is a body of literature backing his broader point that climate change contributes to the growth of terrorism, Sanders is overstating the 'direct' connection. ... We couldn't find any evidence of a 'direct' relationship between climate change and terrorism, though many reports have noted an indirect link."

Maybe so. But when it comes to accuracy, Sanders' remark is light years ahead of Republican politicians and fossil fuel allies who deny the clearly-established scientific consensus that climate change is happening and human activities are the primary cause of it. PolitiFact gave all four of these blatantly false claims the same "mostly false" rating as Sanders' purported "overstatement":

==

This week, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) took a swing at ALEC’s role in helping the fossil fuel lobby deny the science of climate change, during his weekly “Time to Wake Up” speech in the Senate. This comes at an interesting time, as climate denier Willie Soon has been exposed for promising “deliverables” in the form of Congressional influence to coal utility giant Southern Company, to billionaire Charles Koch and to ExxonMobil that paid for Dr. Soon’s climate denial “research.”

With climate deniers on the defense, Sen. Whitehouse has reminded us that Exxon, BP, Shell, Chevron and their lobbying organization, the American Petroleum Institute, have funded scientists like Willie Soon and front groups like ALEC to peddle climate misinformation to the public. Here’s a transcript of highlights from this climate call-out, which earned a favorable fact-check from PolitiFact.

==

The Tampa Bay Times launched its PolitiFact feature in 2007 to fact check claims made by politicians, candidates and special interest groups. At the end of every year, they name their Lie of the Year. 2014’s “exaggerations about ebola” is surely a worthy contender.

:{ :(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;display:block;max-width:600px;max-height:360px"):}:Louisiana congressional candidate Lenar Whitney, who enjoys being called “the Sarah Palin of the South,” won the vote for biggest lie of the year.

But they also let their readers vote, and their readers clearly don’t care for climate deniers. Their Lie of the Year in a landslide is “global warming is a hoax.” It was picked by 31.8 percent of the respondents, with the second biggest “lie”—John Boehner’s claim that there has been a net loss of people with health insurance because of Obamacare—only snagging 18.8 percent. In close third place, with 17.8 percent of the vote, was a claim by Russ Girling that “The State Department says the 42,000 jobs created by the Keystone XL pipeline are ‘ongoing, enduring jobs.'” Who is Russ Girling? Why, he’s the CEO of TransCanada, the company that wants to build Keystone XL.

That means nearly 50 percent of PoliticFact’s readers found anti-climate positions to be the most significant falsehoods in the public discourse.

The specific “global warming is a hoax” statement PolitiFact used as its hook to debunk climate deniers in general was made by Louisiana congressional candidate Lenar Whitney, who enjoys being called “the Sarah Palin of the South.” Washington Post writer David Wasserman calledWhitney “the most frightening candidate I’ve met in seven years interviewing congressional hopefuls.” “It’s tough to decide which party’s worst nightmare she would be,” he said.

One look at her five-minute campaign video on global warming will probably have you agreeing with Wasserman.

“Recently I said something very provocative,” Whitney says in her video. “I said that global warming is a hoax. Naturally, liberals in the lamestream media became unglued and attacked me immediately. But as George Orwell wrote, ‘In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.'”

She calls global warming “the greatest deception in the history of mankind,” saying “Energy security is real, global warming is not. It is merely a strategy designed to give more power to the executive branch while increasing taxes in a progressive stream to regulate every aspect of American life.”

PolitiFact didn’t find a lot of “truth” in her video.

“We’ve lost track of how many times we’ve fact-checked climate change denial claims and found them to be False or Pants on Fire,” it wrote. “But given that it’s still being talked about, we thought it was worth reviewing the evidence again. Whitney’s video offers some specific pieces of evidence that are in need of debunking.”

“We talked to several climate scientists who said Whitney’s claim was ‘laughable,’ ‘deeply misguided,’ ‘uninformed,’ ‘disgusting’ and ‘absurd’,” said PolitiFact before laying out the case for human-caused climate change that is familiar to most people without their heads in the sand. It tore apart such claims as “Any 10 year old can invalidate their thesis with one of the simplest scientific devices known to man: a thermometer. The Earth has done nothing but get colder each year since the film’s [An Inconvenient Truth] release.” PolitiFact points out that she is holding a medical thermometer, not a weather thermometer. She also said polar bears are being forced out of their habitats by overpopulation and that extreme storms were becoming less frequent.

PolitiFact rated her claims “Pants on Fire.” Whitney was defeated in November.

==

*forbes critique: http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2012/11/05/the-ten-worst-fact-checks-of-the-2012-election/*

==

wapo

LONDON — FactCheck.org was started in 2003 by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker and the Tampa Bay Times’ PolitiFact were launched in 2007.

But since 2010, scores of fact-checking Web sites have sprung up across the world. This week, under the auspices of the Poynter Institute, fact checkers from six continents and more than 20 countries, including Argentina, Australia, Chile, Egypt, India, Italy, Serbia, South Africa and Ukraine, gathered for the first time in London to exchange ideas and assess the state of the fact-checking movement. Lucas Graves, a University of Wisconsin scholar who is writing a book on the rise of journalistic fact checking, said only four of the sites represented at the conference existed before 2010. (Istinomer, based in Serbia, was founded in late 2009.)

Participants at the conference voted overwhelmingly to lay the groundwork for an international association of fact checkers, both as a way to highlight the work being done around the world and to serve as an annual forum for exchanging ideas. Duke University’s Reporters’ Lab, which helped organize the meeting, counts 48 active fact-checking organizations in the world.

about us: 

PolitiFact is an independent fact-checking journalism website aimed at bringing you the truth in politics. PolitiFact's reporters and editors fact-check statements from the White House, Congress, candidates, advocacy groups and more, rating claims for accuracy on our Truth-O-Meter. Every fact-check includes analysis of the claim, an explanation of our reasoning and a list of links to all our sources. PolitiFact tracks President Barack Obama's campaign promises on our Obameter.

PolitiFact, a division of the Tampa Bay Times, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for its fact-checking of the presidential election. The Times, Florida's largest newspaper, is **independently owned** by the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Read an extended explanation of our ratings and our approach to fact-checking journalism, the Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter.

breitbart: After PolitiFact rated as "mostly false" a joke made by Republican Senator Ted Cruz, using all the known and provable qualities associated with PolitiFact, Breitbart News engaged in an exhaustive, science and fact-based investigation in order to find a way to perfectly describe the people who run the fact-checking site.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PolitiFact.com

PolitiFact.com is a project operated by the Tampa Bay Times, in which reporters and editors from the Times and affiliated media outlets "fact-check statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists and interest groups".[2] They publish original statements and their evaluations on the PolitiFact.com website, and assign each a "Truth-O-Meter" rating. The ratings range from "True" for completely accurate statements to "Pants on Fire" (from the taunt "Liar, liar, pants on fire") for false and ridiculous claims.[3]

The site also includes an "Obameter", tracking President Barack Obama's performance with regard to his campaign promises, and a "GOP Pledge-O-Meter", which tracks promises made by House Republicans in their "Pledge to America". PolitiFact.com's local affiliates keep similar track of statements and figures of regional relevance, as evidenced by PolitiFact Tennessee's "Haslam-O-Meter" tracking Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam's efforts.[4]

PolitiFact has been both praised and criticized by independent observers, conservatives and liberals alike. Conservative bias and liberal bias have been alleged, and criticisms have been made of attempts to fact-check statements that cannot be truly "fact-checked".

Contents

  [hide] 

AlterNet [1] / By Chris Mooney [2]

The Science of Fox News: Why Its Viewers Are the Most Misinformed

October 20, 2014 |

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from Chris Mooney’s book The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality [3].

In June of 2011, Jon Stewart went on air with Fox News’ Chris Wallace and started a major media controversy over the channel’s misinforming of its viewers. “Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers?” Stewart asked Wallace. “The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.”

Stewart’s statement was factually accurate, as we’ll see. The next day, however, the fact-checking site PolitiFact weighed in [4] and rated it “false.”In claiming to check Stewart’s “facts,” PolitiFact ironically committed a serious error—and later, doubly ironically, failed to correct it. How’s that for the power of fact checking?

There probably is a small group of media consumers out there somewhere in the world who are more misinformed, overall, than Fox News viewers. But if you only consider mainstream U.S. television news outlets with major audiences (e.g., numbering in the millions), it really is true that Fox viewers are the most misled based on all the available evidence—especially in areas of political controversy. This will come as little surprise to liberals, perhaps, but the evidence for it—evidence in Stewart’s favor—is pretty overwhelming.

My goal here is to explore the underlying causes for this “Fox News effect”—explaining how this station has brought about a hurricane-like intensification of factual error, misinformation and unsupportable but ideologically charged beliefs on the conservative side of the aisle. First, though, let’s begin by surveying the evidence about how misinformed Fox viewers actually are.

Based upon my research, I have located seven separate studies that support Stewart’s claim about Fox, and none that undermine it. Six of these studies were available at the time that PolitFact took on Stewart; one of them is newer.

The studies all take a similar form: These are public opinion surveys that ask citizens about their beliefs on factual but contested issues, and also about their media habits. Inevitably, some significant percentage of citizens are found to be misinformed about the facts, and in a politicized way—but not only that. The surveys also find that those who watch Fox are more likely to be misinformed, their views of reality skewed in a right-wing direction. In some cases, the studies even show that watching more Fox makes the misinformation problem worse.

So with that, here are the studies.

Iraq War

In 2003, a survey [5]by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland found widespread public misperceptions about the Iraq war. For instance, many Americans believed the U.S. had evidence that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had been collaborating in some way with Al Qaeda, or was involved in the 9-11 attacks; many also believed that the much touted “weapons of mass destruction” had been found in the country after the U.S. invasion, when they hadn’t. But not everyone was equally misinformed: “The extent of Americans’ misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news,” PIPA reported. “Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions.” For instance, 80 percent of Fox viewers held at least one of three Iraq-related misperceptions, more than a variety of other types of news consumers, and especially NPR and PBS users. Most strikingly, Fox watchers who paid more attention to the channel were more likely to be misled.

Global Warming

At least two studies have documented that Fox News viewers are more misinformed about this subject.

In a late 2010 survey [6], Stanford University political scientist Jon Krosnick and visiting scholar Bo MacInnis found that “more exposure to Fox News was associated with more rejection of many mainstream scientists’ claims about global warming, with less trust in scientists, and with more belief that ameliorating global warming would hurt the U.S. economy.” Frequent Fox viewers were less likely to say the Earth’s temperature has been rising and less likely to attribute this temperature increase to human activities. In fact, there was a 25 percentage point gap between the most frequent Fox News watchers (60%) and those who watch no Fox News (85%) in whether they think global warming is “caused mostly by things people do or about equally by things people do and natural causes.”

In a much more comprehensive study [7] released in late 2011 (too late for Stewart or for PolitiFact), American University communications scholar Lauren Feldman and her colleagues reported on their analysis of a 2008 national survey, which found that “Fox News viewing manifests a significant, negative association with global warming acceptance.” Viewers of the station were less likely to agree that “most scientists think global warming is happening” and less likely to think global warming is mostly caused by human activities, among other measures.

Health Care

In 2009, an NBC survey [8] found “rampant misinformation” about the healthcare reform bill before Congress — derided on the right as “Obamacare.”It also found that Fox News viewers were much more likely to believe this misinformation than average members of the general public. “72% of self-identified Fox News viewers believe the healthcare 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,” the survey found.

By contrast, among CNN and MSNBC viewers, only 41 percent believed the illegal immigrant falsehood, 39 percent believed in the threat of a “government takeover” of healthcare (40 percentage points less), 40 percent believed the falsehood about abortion, and 30 percent believed the falsehood about “death panels” (a 45 percent difference!).

In early 2011, the Kaiser Family Foundation released another survey [9] on public misperceptions about healthcare reform. The poll asked 10 questions about the newly passed healthcare law and compared the “high scorers”—those that answered 7 or more correct—based on their media habits. The result was that “higher shares of those who report CNN (35 percent) or MSNBC (39 percent) as their primary news source [got] 7 or more right, compared to those that report mainly watching Fox News (25 percent).”

"Ground Zero Mosque”

In late 2010, two scholars at the Ohio State University studied public misperceptions [10] about the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”—and in particular, the prevalence of a series of rumors depicting those seeking to build this Islamic community center and mosque as terrorist sympathizers, anti-American, and so on. All of these rumors had, of course, been dutifully debunked by fact-checking organizations. The result? “People who use Fox News believe more of the rumors we asked about and they believe them more strongly than those who do not.”

The 2010 Election

In late 2010, the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) once again singled out Fox in a survey about misinformation during the 2010 election [11]. Out of 11 false claims studied in the survey, PIPA found that “almost daily” Fox News viewers were “significantly more likely than those who never watched it” to believe 9 of them, including the misperceptions that “most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring” (they do), that “it is not clear that President Obama was born in the United States” (he was), that “most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses” (it either saved or created several million), that “most economists have estimated the healthcare law will worsen the deficit” (they have not), and so on.

It is important to note that in this study—by far the most critiqued of the bunch—the examples of misinformation studied were all closely related to prominent issues in the 2010 midterm election, and indeed, were selected precisely because they involved issues that voters said were of greatest importance to them, like healthcare and the economy. That was the main criterion for inclusion, explains PIPA senior research scholar Clay Ramsay. “People said, here’s how I would rank that as an influence on my vote,” says Ramsay, “so everything tested is at least a 5 on a zero-to-10 scale.”

Politifact Swings and Misses

In attempting to fact-check Jon Stewart on the subject of Fox News and misinformation, PolitiFact simply appeared out of its depth. The author of the article in question, Louis Jacobson, only cited two of the studies above--“Iraq War” and “2010 Election”—though six out of seven were available at the time he was writing. And then he suggested that the “2010 Election” study should “carry less weight” due to various methodological objections.

Meanwhile, Jacobson dug up three separate studies that we can dismiss as irrelevant. That’s because these studies did not concern misinformation, but rather, how informed news viewers are about basic political facts like the following: “who the vice president is, who the president of Russia is, whether the Chief Justice is conservative, which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives and whether the U.S. has a trade deficit.”

A long list of public opinion studies have shown that too few Americans know the answers to such basic questions. That’s lamentable, but also off point at the moment. These are not politically contested issues, nor are they skewed by an active misinformation campaign. As a result, on such issues many Americans may be ill-informed but liberals and conservatives are nevertheless able to agree.

Jon Stewart was clearly talking about political misinformation. He used the word “misinformed.” And for good reason: Misinformation is by far the bigger torpedo to our national conversation, and to any hope of a functional politics. “It’s one thing to be not informed,” explains David Barker, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied conservative talk-radio listeners and Fox viewers. “It’s another thing to be misinformed, where you’re confident in your incorrectness. That’s the thing that’s really more problematic, democratically speaking—because if you’re confidently wrong, you’re influencing people.”

Thus PolitiFact’s approach was itself deeply uninformed, and underscores just how poorly our mainstream political discourse deals with the problem of systematic right wing misinformation.

Fox and the Republican Brain

The evidence is clear, then—the Politifact-Stewart flap notwithstanding, Fox viewers are the most misinformed. But then comes the truly interesting and important question: Why is that the case?

To answer it, we’ll first need to travel back to the 1950s, and the pioneering work of the Stanford psychologist and cult infiltrator, Leon Festinger.

In his 1957 book A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Festinger built on his famous study of a doomsday cult [12] called the Seekers, and other research, to lay out many ramifications of his core idea about why human beings contort the evidence to fit their beliefs, rather than conforming those beliefs to the evidence. That included a prediction about how those who are highly committed to a belief or view should go about seeking information that touches on that powerful conviction.

Festinger suggested that once we’ve settled on a core belief, this ought to shape how we gather information. More specifically, we are likely to try to avoid encountering claims and information that challenge that belief, because these will create cognitive dissonance. Instead, we should go looking for information that affirms the belief. The technical (and less than ideal) term for this phenomenon is “selective exposure”: what it means is that we selectively choose to be exposed to information that is congenial to our beliefs, and to avoid “inconvenient truths” that are uncongenial to them.

If Festinger’s ideas about “selective exposure” are correct, then the problem with Fox News may not solely be that it is actively causing its viewers to be misinformed. It’s very possible that Fox could be imparting misinformation even as politically conservative viewers are also seeking the station out—highly open to it and already convinced about many falsehoods that dovetail with their beliefs. Thus, they would come into the encounter with Fox not only misinformed and predisposed to become more so, but inclined to be very confident about their incorrect beliefs and to impart them to others. In this account, political misinformation on the right would be driven by a kind of feedback loop, with both Fox and its viewers making the problem worse.

Psychologists and political scientists have extensively studied selective exposure, and within the research literature, the findings are often described as mixed. But that’s not quite right. In truth, some early studies seeking to confirm Festinger’s speculation had problems with their designs and often failed—and as a result, explains University of Alabama psychologist William Hart, the field of selective exposure research “stagnated” for several decades. But it has since undergone a dramatic revival—driven, not surprisingly, by the modern explosion of media choices and growing political polarization in the U.S. And thanks to a new wave of better-designed and more rigorous studies, the concept has become well established.

“Selective exposure is the clearest way to look at how people create their own realities, based upon their views of the world,” says Hart. “Everybody knows this happens.”

Indeed, by 2009, Hart and a team of researchers were able to perform a meta-analysis [13]—a statistically rigorous overview of published studies on selective exposure—that pooled together 67 relevant studies, encompassing almost 8,000 individuals. As a result, he found that people overall were nearly twice as likely to consume ideologically congenial information as to consume ideologically inconvenient information—and in certain circumstances, they were even more likely than that.

When are people most likely to seek out self-affirming information? Hart found that they’re most vulnerable to selective exposure if they have defensive goals—for instance, being highly committed to a preexisting view, and especially a view that is tied to a person’s core values. Another defensive motivation identified in Hart’s study was closed-mindedness, which makes a great deal of sense. It is probably part of the definition of being closed-minded, or dogmatic, that you prefer to consume information that agrees with what you already believe.

So who’s closed-minded? Multiple studies have shown that political conservatives—e.g., Fox viewers--tend to have a higher need for closure [14]. Indeed, this includes a group called right-wing authoritarians [15], who are increasingly prevalent in the Republican Party. This suggests they should also be more likely to select themselves into belief-affirming information streams, like Fox News or right-wing talk radio or the Drudge Report. Indeed, a number of research results support this idea.

In a study of selective exposure during the 2000 election, for instance, Stanford University’s Shanto Iyengar and his colleagues mailed a multimedia informational CD about the two candidates—Bush and Gore—to 600 registered voters and then tracked its use by a sample of 220 of them. As a result, they found that Bush partisans chose to consume more information about Bush than about Gore—but Democrats and liberals didn’t show the same bias toward their own candidate.

Selective exposure has also been directly tested several times in authoritarians. In one case, researchers at Stony Brook University [16] primed more and less authoritarian subjects with thoughts of their own mortality. Afterwards, the authoritarians showed a much stronger preference than non-authoritarians for reading an article that supported their existing view on the death penalty, rather than an article presenting the opposing view or a “balanced” take on the issue. As the authors concluded: “highly authoritarian individuals, when threatened, attempt to reduce anxiety by selectively exposing themselves to attitude-validating information, which leads to ‘stronger’ opinions that are more resistant to attitude change.”

The psychologist Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba has also documented an above average amount of selective exposure in right wing authoritarians. In one case, he gave students a fake self-esteem test, in which they randomly received either above average or below average scores. Then, everyone—the receivers of both low and high scores—was given the opportunity to say whether he or she would like to read a summary of why the test was valid. The result was striking: Students who scored low on authoritarianism wanted to learn about the validity of the test regardless of how they did on it. There was virtually no difference between high and low scorers. But among the authoritarian students, there was a big gap: 73 percent of those who got high self-esteem scores wanted to read about the test’s validity, while only 47 percent of those who got low self-esteem scores did.

Authoritarians, Altemeyer concludes, “maintain their beliefs against challenges by limiting their experiences, and surrounding themselves with sources of information that will tell them they are right.”

The evidence on selective exposure, as well as the clear links between closed-mindedness and authoritarianism, gives good grounds for believing that this phenomenon should be more common and more powerful on the political right. Lest we leap to the conclusion that Fox News is actively misinforming its viewers most of the time—rather than enabling them through its very existence—that’s something to bear in mind.

Disinformation Passing as “News”

None of which is to suggest that Fox isn’t also guilty of actively misinforming viewers. It certainly is.

The litany of misleading Fox segments and snippets is quite extensive—especially on global warming, where it seems that every winter snowstorm is an excuse for more doubt-mongering. No less than Fox’s Washington managing editor Bill Sammon was found to have written, in a 2009 internal staff email exposed by MediaMatters [17], that the network’s journalists should:

. . . refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.

And global warming is hardly the only issue where Fox actively misinforms its viewers. The polling data here, from the Project on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) are very telling.

PIPA’s study of misinformation in the 2010 election didn’t just show that Fox News viewers were more misinformed than viewers of other channels. It also showed that watching more Fox made believing in nine separate political misperceptions more likely. And that was a unique effect, unlike any observed with the other news channels that were studied. “With all of the other media outlets, the more exposed you were, the less likely you were to have misinformation,” explains PIPA’s director, political psychologist Steven Kull. “While with Fox, the more exposure you had, in most cases, the more misinformation you had. And that is really, in a way, the most powerful factor, because it strongly suggests they were actually getting the information from Fox.”

Indeed, this effect was even present in non-Republicans--another indicator that Fox is probably its cause. As Kull explains, “even if you’re a liberal Democrat, you are affected by the station.” If you watched Fox, you were more likely to believe the nine falsehoods, regardless of your political party affiliation.

In summary, then, the “science” of Fox News clearly shows that its viewers are more misinformed than the viewers of other stations, and are indeed this way for ideological reasons. But these are not necessarily the reasons that liberals may assume. Instead, the Fox “effect” probably occurs both because the station churns out falsehoods that conservatives readily accept—falsehoods that may even seem convincing to some liberals on occasion—but also because conservatives are overwhelmingly inclined to choose to watch Fox to begin with.

At the same time, it’s important to note that they’re also disinclined to watch anything else. Fox keeps constantly in their minds the idea that the rest of the media are “biased” against them, and conservatives duly respond by saying other media aren’t worth watching—it’s just a pack of lies. According to Public Policy Polling’s annual TV News Trust Poll (the 2011 run), 72 percent of conservatives say they trust Fox News, but they also say they strongly distrust NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN. Liberals and moderates, in contrast, trust all of these outlets more than they distrust them (though they distrust Fox). This, too, suggests conservative selective exposure.

And there is an even more telling study of “Fox-only” behavior among conservatives, from Stanford’s Shanto Iyengar and Kyu Hahn of Yonsei University, in Seoul, South Korea. They conducted a classic left-right selective exposure study [18], giving members of different ideological groups the chance to choose stories from a news stream that provided them with a headline and a news source logo—Fox, CNN, NPR, and the BBC—but nothing else. The experiment was manipulated so that the same headline and story was randomly attributed to different news sources. The result was that Democrats and liberals were definitely less inclined to choose Fox than other sources, but spread their interest across the other outlets when it came to news. But Republicans and conservatives overwhelmingly chose Fox for hard news and even for soft news, and ignored other sources. “The probability that a Republican would select a CNN or NPR report was around 10%,” wrote the authors.

In other words Fox News is both deceiver and enabler simultaneously. First, its existence creates the opportunity for conservatives to exercise their biases, by selecting into the Fox information stream, and also by imbibing Fox-style arguments and claims that can then fuel biased reasoning about politics, science, and whatever else comes up.

But at the same time, it’s also likely that conservatives, tending to be more closed-minded and more authoritarian, have a stronger emotional need for an outlet like Fox, where they can find affirmation and escape from the belief challenges constantly presented by the “liberal media.” Their psychological need for something affirmative is probably stronger than what’s encountered on the opposite side of the aisle—as is their revulsion towards allegedly liberal (but really centrist) media outlets.

And thus we find, at the root of our political dysfunction, a classic nurture-nature mélange. The penchant for selective exposure is rooted in our psychology and our brains. Closed-mindedness and authoritarianism—running stronger in some of us than in others—likely are as well.

But nevertheless, it took the emergence of a station like Fox News before these tendencies could be fully activated—polarizing America not only over politics, but over reality itself.

See more stories tagged with:

fox news [20],

the republican brain [21],

Chris mooney [22],

television [23],

information [24],

misinformation [25]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/media/science-fox-news-why-its-viewers-are-most-misinformed

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/chris-mooney

[3] http://republicanbrain.com/

[4] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jun/20/jon-stewart/jon-stewart-says-those-who-watch-fox-news-are-most/

[5] http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/IraqMedia_Oct03/IraqMedia_Oct03_rpt.pdf

[6] http://woods.stanford.edu/docs/surveys/Global-Warming-Fox-News.pdf

[7] http://climateshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/FeldmanStudy.pdf

[8] http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2009/08/19/4431138-first-thoughts-obamas-good-bad-news

[9] http://www.kff.org/healthreform/upload/8148.pdf

[10] http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/kgarrett/MediaMosqueRumors.pdf

[11] http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/dec10/Misinformation_Dec10_rpt.pdf

[12] http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney

[13] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19586162

[14] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_%28psychology%29

[15] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism

[16] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2005.00416.x/abstract

[17] http://mediamatters.org/blog/201012150004

[18] http://metaether.org/words/articles/articles/red%20media,%20blue%20media.pdf

[19] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Science of Fox News: Why Its Viewers Are the Most Misinformed

[20] http://www.alternet.org/tags/fox-news

[21] http://www.alternet.org/tags/republican-brain

[22] http://www.alternet.org/tags/chris-mooney

[23] http://www.alternet.org/tags/television-0

[24] http://www.alternet.org/tags/information

[25] http://www.alternet.org/tags/misinformation

[26] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B