Studies show that for Fox News Viewers, "the more you watch, the more you think you know is actually false."

In Dollarcracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America, John Nichols writes:

In November 2011, Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind Poll examined how New Jerseyans watched television news, and the poll concluded that “some outlets, especially Fox News, lead people to be even less informed than those who say they don’t watch any news at all.” 

In some surveys, to be accurate, Fox News does not rank at rock bottom in terms of audience knowledge. But on balance, it is the clown dunce of TV news. No other network ever comes close to getting the sort of assessment Fox News received from World Public Opinion, a project managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland, in 2010. As one reporter summarized it, PIPA conducted a “survey of American voters that shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. 

What’s more, the study shows that greater exposure to Fox News increases misinformation. So the more you watch, the less you know. Or to be precise, the more you think you know that is actually false.” As Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson concluded in their study of the Tea Party, “Fox News makes viewers both more conservative and less informed.” What may be most revealing is that there is no evidence that this finding bothers the management of Fox News in the least.

Jonathan Safran Foer on “iDistractions”

There's a K-5 school near our home, and so on a daily basis, I see mothers and fathers walking their children to classrooms. This would be more heartwarming if 50% of the parents weren't blithely ignoring their offspring in favor of staring at their smartphones.

Remind me—why did you have kids again?

I believe that the increased daily use of new technology—particularly smartphones—may limit our capacity for empathy and compassion. So I was interested in this article by Jonathan Safran Foer that makes a convincing case for just that. 

Most of our communication technologies began as diminished substitutes for an impossible activity. We couldn’t always see one another face to face, so the telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance. One is not always home, so the answering machine made a kind of interaction possible without the person being near his phone. Online communication originated as a substitute for telephonic communication, which was considered, for whatever reasons, too burdensome or inconvenient. And then texting, which facilitated yet faster, and more mobile, messaging. These inventions were not created to be improvements upon face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it. 

But then a funny thing happened: we began to prefer the diminished substitutes. It’s easier to make a phone call than to schlep to see someone in person. Leaving a message on someone’s machine is easier than having a phone conversation — you can say what you need to say without a response; hard news is easier to leave; it’s easier to check in without becoming entangled. So we began calling when we knew no one would pick up. 

Shooting off an e-mail is easier, still, because one can hide behind the absence of vocal inflection, and of course there’s no chance of accidentally catching someone. And texting is even easier, as the expectation for articulateness is further reduced, and another shell is offered to hide in. Each step “forward” has made it easier, just a little, to avoid the emotional work of being present, to convey information rather than humanity.

Sophistry for the Unsophisticated

Over at NPR, there's a piece up about the impact new gun laws are having on some weapons manufacturers. It yields this priceless bit:

Lawrence Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade association based in Newtown, Conn. He says the state's new gun law is misguided because it will only affect law-abiding gun owners.

Now try using this justification for ANY other law and see how silly it sounds.
—"Our new stop signs are misguided because they only affect law-abiding drivers.”
—"When you outlaw embezzlement, only outlaws will embezzle.”
—"Spun honey is inhumane and must be banned. Do you have any idea of what a centrifuge does to a beehive?”