And yet somehow, Fox News viewers remain uninformed.
There are few things in this world as resilient as
good old-fashioned ignorance.
False beliefs about the invasion of Iraq and President Obama’s citizenship still flourish among Americans, according to the most recent national survey from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind. More than four-in-ten Americans say it is likely that U.S. forces found active weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, and nearly a fifth say that President Obama “probably” or “definitely” is not a citizen of the United States.
That is a new poll, meaning four in ten Americans
in 2015 still think active WMD programs were discovered in Iraq. This is perhaps understandable, as there is an entire infrastructure now built around telling people whatever lies they want to hear.
The major split in these views seems to arise from partisanship, and the broadcast media divide on the issue bears this out. Respondents were asked about which news sources, in particular, they get their news from, as well as which television news they consider to be their primary source of information. Individuals who reported getting their news from Fox were more likely to say that the WMD program had been found, with 52 percent saying that it was “probably” or “definitely” true, and those who get their news from MSNBC were the least likely, with only 14 percent saying the same.
“It’s easier for people to maintain false beliefs when they avoid media sources that might refute them,” said Cassino. “So it’s no surprise that people who watch ideological media are better able to hold on to these sorts of beliefs.”
In other words—and I believe we have repeated this enough, to no effect, so we may have to in the future resort to etching it on the sides of buildings or putting it as bold-lettered warning on the boxes of all new television sets, surgeon general style—watching Fox News continues to make you stupid, because it intentionally continues to tell you things that Are Not True, and mind you this is an ostensible
news network which makes the misinformation not merely an ideological giggle shared between drinking buddies, but a daily and well-heeled propaganda effort seeking to ensure that The Base receives an interpretation of "reality" that will render them sufficiently pliable when the bunglers that so badly fouled things the last time around come a-courting adherents again.
If the invasion of Iraq was not a bungled fiasco built on crooked propagandizing but a glorious effort that narrowly averted an Iraqi plan to launch a nuclear-tipped missile into Dallas, then Dick Cheney et. al can still be considered Statesmen and worth listening to. If The Base is not allowed in polite company to declare that President Barack Obama is an illegitimate president because he is a not white and all Americans who are not white are somehow illegitimate and "foreign" members of the American experience, then perhaps he is an illegitimate president because of an elaborate and worldwide conspiracy to plant an actual false-paperworked foreigner there, and The Base loathes the current president not based on the still-raw racism that has been an ideological staple of conservatism throughout our modern political history but due to their brilliant and well-honed abilities in discovering actual plots against the fatherland, no matter how unlikely those plots may seem.
We've had enough of these surveys that it can no longer be dismissed as a one-off tidbit or fluke result. Yes, watching Fox News is strongly correlated to believing specific not-true things, go figure, who woulda thunk. The study also reinforces that people who believe untrue things tend to not know actual facts surrounding the things they believe, such as being able to name the three branches of government or which party currently controls the House; a very interesting test would be for Fox News to run old Schoolhouse Rock episodes between shows in an attempt to at least goose the base knowledge of their viewers. It probably wouldn't help with the conspiracy theory part, but at least they'd be able to sing the little songs.