On my post about how watching Fox News makes you stupider, commenter Tevyeh asks, "Any thoughts on how a higher percentange of Republicans than Democrats answered correctly on each of the eight questions?" That's a reasonable enough question, but I don't think the survey results bear out a big difference between Republicans and Democrats:
What's more, while I'd rather everyone just knew everything, I'm more interested in what party elites say and do than I am in polls of everyone.
I spelled out that rationale here:
most people don't pay much attention to politics. (I don't begrudge anyone that, either.) For a long while, I thought that "the science is uncertain" about climate change, because I just heard the rhetoric from "both sides", and figured they both had a point. Then I looked into the data & the scientific consensus, and was shocked at how one-sided the facts were. The media is terrible at reporting the news, viewing journalism as the act of typing down the two sides' talking points without any effort to ascertain facts. So unless you go digging into the facts of the case yourself, you'll walk away with the vague idea that "the truth is probably somewhere in the middle" on light bulb regulations, climate change, and everything else. The confusion over climate change, like the resentment of light bulb laws, comes from the PR campaign, not from the issue itself.
(I offered similar explanations
here and
here).
So, if 30% of Republicans think that climate change and evolution are socialist plots, it doesn't really matter, unless party elites pander to or share their commitment to idiocy. Unfortunately, all leading Republican politicians and commentators do push idiocy, on climate change, on evolution, on balancing the budget by reducing revenue, by arguing that the Heritage Foundation's health insurance reform plan is tyrannical and unconstitutional, or that regulatory uncertainty is harming our economy, or that the preamble in a treaty is an assault on America, or that we suffer from inflation, excessive taxation, and a need for fiscal austerity now, etc.
There's nothing comparable on the other side. One can reasonably take issue with any given Democratic policy, of course, but there aren't any that are based on transparent lies. Alas, that's not something we can say about Republican politicians. Pres. Obama put a deal on the table that was to the right of what even GOP voters say they want on entitlements; Congressional Republicans rejected it because it included taxes. The Dems in 2004 nominated a guy who'd supported the highly controversial, and catastrophic, invasion & occupation of Iraq. The Republicans have no one anywhere who supported the enacting of the health insurance reform policy that had been GOP boilerplate for decades. That's because the Democrats are a centrist party, and the GOP is extreme.
As mentioned, part of the problem is the media's centrist bias-- the unshakable conviction that "both sides are too extreme", regardless of how many sides there are, or how extreme they are.
We can see that bias at work in FDU's writeup of their research.
Here are the charts on responses to the questions, divided by news source:
So it looks like the questions FDU asked weren't all that well addressed by any news source; Fox News and NPR are the real outliers.
But here's the first paragraph of the PublicMind writeup, followed by a few later paragraphs:
According to a follow-up survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University's PublicMindTM, NPR and Sunday morning political talk shows are the most informative news outlets, while exposure to partisan sources, such as Fox News and MSNBC, has a negative impact on people's current events knowledge. This nationwide survey confirms initial findings presented in a New Jersey focused poll (from November of 2011). ...
On the whole, MSNBC, for instance, had no impact on political knowledge one way or the other. However, liberals who watched MSNBC did better on the knowledge questions, answering correctly 1.89 of the domestic questions and 1.64 of the international questions correctly. Similarly, while moderates and liberals who watch Fox News do worse at answering the questions than others, conservatives who watch Fox do no worse than people who watch no news at all. ...
"Ideological news sources, like Fox and MSNBC, are really just talking to one audience," said Cassino. "This is solid evidence that if you're not in that audience, you're not going to get anything out of watching them."
That's just a determinedly slanted, "both sides are to blame" reading of the results.
Fox is a huge outlier. Both Fox News and MSNBC's results are dragged down by the overhelming ignorance of the answers from their dissenting viewers, but MSNBC's viewers fare about as well as viewers of CNN-- and liberal MSNBC viewers fare better than average.
This study is interesting because it shows that Fox News thinks that its ideological interests are best served by its viewers remaining ignorant. (Or, to put it in a bit less of an inflammatory manner, that the folks who run Fox News don't care whether its viewers learn any facts. Sheer rage will do). But the folks at FDU write it up to blame "both sides", in a way the data just doesn't justify.
As we've seen again and again, the problem with our politics is the Republican Party. And if you rely on the Sunday talk shows for your news, you might be more likely to know how things are going for Hosni Mubarak, but you're less likely to know about the most important facts about American politics.