Why Fox News Viewers Don't Know Shit

This post was lifted from one of my every day reads, News Hounds for the Common Good, who's motto is "We watch Fox so you don't have to."

I have always thought that David Frum was a thoughtful and intelligent pundit for the right. It's not that I agree with what he is saying at times, but he lays out a intelligent position for the "right".

He use to be on Fox news pundit, but after he called Rush Limbaugh out for having way to much power over the Republicans, he was band from the network. This goes hand and hand with a new study that Fox News viewers are less informed than people who don't watch any news, according to a new poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University.

David Frum, who has been a Republican all his adult life, as he says in a recent New York Magazine article, called “When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?” answers the question by laying much of the blame for that at the feet of Fox “News.”


Fox News and Talk Radio
Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn't matter who your parents were or where you came from.”

We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information