Jon Stewart Was Correct. Fox News Viewers Are The Most Misinformed
I have a lot of respect for political fact checking sites. I think they play a critical role, especially in our misinformation-saturated political and media environment.
However, sometimes these sites fall for the allure of phony bipartisanship. In other words, in an environment in which conservatives are more inaccurate and more misinformed about science and basic policy facts, the “fact checkers” nevertheless feel unduly compelled to correct “liberal” errors too—which is fine, as long as they are really errors.
But sometimes they aren’t. A case in point is Politifact’s recent and deeply misguided attempt to correct Jon Stewart on the topic of…misinformation and Fox News. This is a subject on which we’ve developed some expertise here…my recent post on studies showing that Fox News viewers are more misinformed, on an array of issues, is the most comprehensive such collection that I’m aware of, at least when it comes to public opinion surveys detecting statistical correlations between being misinformed about contested facts and Fox News viewership. I’ve repeatedly asked whether anyone knows of additional studies—including contradictory studies—but none have yet been cited.
Stewart, very much in the vein of my prior post, went on the air with Fox’s Chris Wallace and stated,
"Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll."
My research, and my recent post, most emphatically supports this statement. Indeed, I cited five (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) separate public opinion studies in support of it—although I carefully noted that these studies do not prove causation (e.g., that watching Fox News causes one to be more misinformed). The causal arrow could very well run the other way—believing wrong things could make one more likely to watch Fox News in the first place.
Polifact provides a great service and they are right most of the time. Sometimes they bend themselves into a pretzel trying to be fair and end up being, to use their jargon, mostly wrong.
Some corporations spending more on executive pay than income taxes
As has been amply documented, income inequality in the United States has soared to historic (in a bad way) levels, with the richest 1% getting 24% of the income. If numbers like that don't convince you that corporations are doing their best to increase income inequality, consider this:No wonder no one is hiring. If corporations can rake in profits without hiring they will. Obviously they do not need more tax cuts to encourage them to do more hiring.
According to a new report called “S.& P. 500 Executive Pay: Bigger Than …Whatever You Think It Is,” put together by the independent research firm R. G. Associates, there are currently 32 companies that actually spent more on compensation for their top executives in 2010 than they paid in corporate income taxes
