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Audio readings of TRANSlating Everything content and wacky discussions!
Science Proves (Again) That Watching Fox News Makes You Dumber Than Not Watching Any News At All
So why can’t we stop watching?
If watching Fox News makes people dumb, why do we keep watching?
Aside from the paradox that the dumber you are, the harder it is to perceive your own dumbness…
Who likes Fox News?
As far as ratings go, Fox News is #1.
Despite its clever branding claiming otherwise, Fox News Channel (FNC) is far and away the most popular mainstream cable news network. Since its inception in 1996, the channel has grown bigger, and bigger, and bigger.
But in 2012, a much-publicized study revealed a shocking crack in the Faux News facade.
Trouble in Bill O’Reilly’s paradise
The 2012 study showed that watching Fox News (and MSNBC lol) often made people dumber than if they hadn’t watched any news at all.
But it wasn’t until I looked into what inspired that study — and the results of similar studies being conducted again and again — that I discovered just how bad the problem is.
Fox News: making people dumb since 1996
LOL so there was just one study?
Nope. There were five-ish (2011, 2012, 2016, 2020, and a case study of the 2020 study).
In 2011 and 2012, two Public Mind studies provided four key findings.
watching Fox News was terrible if you wanted to learn anything you didn’t already know
watching Fox News was terrible if you didn’t want to warp your understanding of anything you already knew
watching Jon Stewart/The Daily Show helped you more than virtually any other news source
partisanship didn’t change the results
But while watching Fox News makes you dumb, you really need to hear how much worse it is for people who go to the Fox News website.
The foxnews.com bust
In 2020, a study utilized the 2016 American National Election Survey (ANES) to investigate whether consuming content from foxnews.com is associated with decreased political knowledge.
The study found a “significant, negative relationship between visiting foxnews.com and facts about society writ large,” what the researcher distinguished as “society-oriented knowledge.”
“Examples of society-oriented knowledge included whether unemployment had gotten better or worse over the past year, whether Barack Obama was a Muslim, and whether the world’s temperature had been slowly increasing over the past 100 years.” — Consuming content from Fox News is associated with decreased knowledge of science and society
It’s not like it told us anything we didn’t already suspect
But still, isn’t it nice to know that you’re not crazy?
That the people who watch Fox News really do tend to be less informed?
That even you can’t help but walk away from their programming (and their website?!) feeling a little more dumb just for having given them a shot?
“I’ve spoken about this before, but if you watch Fox News, you perceive a different reality than if you read The New York Times. And those differences have been amplified by social media, which allows people to live in bubbles with other people who think like them.” -Barack Obama, “Fox News viewers ‘perceive a different reality’ than other Americans”
See also: How Right-Leaning Media Coverage of COVID-19 Facilitated the Spread of Misinformation in the Early Stages of the Pandemic in the U.S.
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