NPR and PBS were my lifeline during the dark days of the Bush whitehouse, and it turns out that a 2003 study of the media and public misconceptions supports my belief that NPR/PBS are the best large-scale media we have to offer.
.pdf of study
Misconceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War
http://www.pipa.org/...
The best stuff starts on page 12.
The report starts off by identifying the problem, of which we are ALL now aware of. The problem that too many Americans believed that 9/11 and Saddam Hussein were linked, that we had found WMDs in Iraq...and that those misconceptions specifically led people to support the Iraq war.
The effect of misconceptions was profound:
Among those with NONE of 3 specific misconceptions: 23% support for war
Among those with ONE of 3 specific misconceptions: 53% support for war
Among those with TWO of 3 specific misconceptions: 78% support for war
Among those with THREE of 3 specific misconceptions: 86% support for war
Note: Misperceptions included were that evidence of Iraq-al Qaeda links have been found, WMD have been found and world public opinion favored Iraq war.
Then it looks at WHY Americans had these misconceptions, specifically examining the number of misconceptions found from news consumers of Fox, CBS, NBC,
One or more misconceptions among viewers of:
Fox news watchers 80%
CBS news watchers 71%
NBC 61%
CNN 55%
Print media 47%
NPR/PBS 23%
Among Bush supporters: 87% who watched Fox had misconceptions, and 50% of NPR/PBS users had misconceptions.
Among Democrats: 47% who watched Fox had misconceptions; whereas 0% of NPR /PBS users had misconceptions
The study goes on to show that the more news the Bush supporters watched, the more misconceptions there were.....And the opposite was true with the Dems, although the misconceptions were comparatively quite low. AND EVEN PRO-BUSHERS HAD LOWER MISCONCEPTION RATES WHEN THEY CONSUMED PBS/NPR.
In all media, you have to be able to separate the wheat from the shinola (or something)....and that is true for NPR too. However, when you withhold money from your radio station you lose this lifeline to real news. NOT ONLY NPR, but also all the other news reporting that happens there. NPR attracts the viewers that end up listening to interviews with Scott Ritter on Fresh Aire, and to This American life.
I will always be grateful to my public radio station, because just about everything else was hard-core PROPAGANDA.