Really, Fox News makes you dumber.

In my critical thinking courses I like to make the claim that watching or consuming Mainstream Media, particularly outlets like Fox News makes individuals dumber and more misinformed. The line usually gets a laugh or two, and-for those with a more liberal bent-the sentiment seems obviously true. However, as critical thinkers we must be careful about believing things because they fit with our own biases or preconceptions. We are interested in the truth and getting it right, regardless of how that might make us feel or hurt our feelings. So, is it true that watching Fox News makes you dumber?

Fortunately, I am by no means the first to articulate such a question, and a fair degree of research has been performed on exactly this question, looking to answer it concerning a variety of issues of great public importance. Chris Mooney at Alternet has a great roundup of the research, and much of the following discussion is taken from his article.

Mooney looks at 7 studies that support the claim that viewers of Fox News are more misinformed about the world than people who get their news from non-Fox sources. All of these studies basically took the form of interviews with with individuals, and then correlated the beliefs of those individuals with their media consumption habits. Every single one of these studies showed that people who get the majority of their information from Fox News were significantly more likely to believe things that are not true about the world.

I want to focus in one one of the studies looked at by Mooney. This study, published at the end of 2010 was conducted by PIPA, and looked at misinformation among voters during the 2010 midterm elections. Summarizing the results of the study to Mooney, one of the authors drew the following conclusion:

“With all of the other media outlets, the more exposed you were, the less likely you were to have misinformation,” explains PIPA’s director, political psychologist Steven Kull. “While with Fox, the more exposure you had, in most cases, the more misinformation you had. And that is really, in a way, the most powerful factor, because it strongly suggests they were actually getting the information from Fox.”

Similar results were born out by other studies consulted by Mooney, and collectively these make clear that consuming too much Fox News leads to a greater degree of misinformation among those viewers, and thus among the electorate generally. This is a significant problem and a real threat to democracy, but one without a clear solution.

Those "Black Americans" sure look pretty white

The above image comes from this article on the Intercept, and it illustrates the top donors to a SuperPac calling itself "Black Americans for a Better Future."  This is an excellent example of a Front Group. As the website SourceWatch defines it, "A front group is an organization that purports to represent one agenda while in reality it serves some other party or interest whose sponsorship is hidden or rarely mentioned." In this case, we have a group of wealthy, white, Republican donors who are trying to engage in some political outreach to African-American voters. The problem is that they present themselves as being a group of like-minded black citizens (it's right there in the title). The group does have an African-American spokesman by the name of Raynard Jackson, but he is just that, a spokesman. He is not donating to the group (or if he is,it is less than $250), he is not setting the agenda for the group, he is just being paid by these rich white guys to make it appear that large numbers of concerned black citizens support Republican policies. This is, unfortunately, all too common in American politics, but it is not so often that one sees such an egregious example.

A Slippery Slope is a fallacy in which change in one direction is assumed to lead to further disastrous change in the same direction. Depending on how extreme the slope gets, some of these can be quite humorous. Case in point is a series of ads from DirectTV in which the basic narrative of the ad is a series of slippery slopes describing all the horrible consequences that will follow if one doesn't purchase DirectTV. While these are intentionally absurd, they are still a good model of the kind of flawed reasoning exhibited by this fallacy.

A funny Amphiboly

Here is another great example of Amphiboly or Amphibology, which is when one produces statements that can be interpreted in multiple ways due to ambiguous grammar.

In this case, it would appear that one would need to have all four of the conditions described above in order to use the restroom. While I understand the importance of reserving special spaces for those in need, I am not sure how many elderly children are actually served by this.

George Carlin on Critical Thinking

This clip from (I think) a fairly late George Carlin special serves as an excellent introduction to the topic of critical thinking, and I largely agree with Carlin's analysis of the importance and necessity of developing critical thinking skills. without them we are at the mercy of powerful and well-connected groups and individuals who are committed to acquiring more for themselves at the expense of everyone else.

One of the best George Carlin routines ever. Miss ya, George!
Posted by Brandon Weber on Friday, March 27, 2015

Here is a link to the source of the video.

Quote, interrupted

As I tell my classes, Eduction is when one takes a quote out of its original context to change the meaning. This occurs in many different contexts, but one of the most well-known and obvious is when quotations are pulled from a review and then used in marketing. This happens in all domains, but is most obvious in the case of films and DVD's. I came across an excellent example of this while perusing one of my favorite pop culture websites (got to keep up with the kids and stay relevant!) the AV Club. One of their writers, A.A. Dowd, recently penned an open letter to media company Mongrel Media, calling them out for misquoting one of his reviews for a blurb on the back of the DVD release of the film Nailed (Accidental Love in the US).  First, here is the blurb on the back of the DVD:

A comedic masterstroke.

This is fairly high praise, and if one is familiar with this reviewer, this recommendation would be a good reason to pick up the film. However, if we look back at Dowd's original C- review, we find that this "praise" is not as high as it might initially appear:

To be fair to whoever refashioned Accidental Love from the abandoned scraps of Nailed, there’s little reason to believe that the ideal, untroubled version of the material would have been a comedic masterstroke. [Emphasis added]

As we can see,  Mongrel Media just lopped off the beginning of the sentence to completely change the original meaning of the quotation. This is a textbook example of eduction, and it occurs much more frequently than you might think.

Don't Believe Anonymous Governmental Sources

In discussing the media with my classes I find it very helpful to use Chomsky and Hermann's Propaganda Model of the Media. This framework, first articulated in 1988 in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, consists of five filters that Chomsky and Hermann argue shape the way the media functions on the West. The third of these filters is Sourcing which involves the media relying on a limited range of sources for their reporting. Furthermore, these sources tend to be governmental officials or PR reps for large corporations meaning that most stories in the Mainstream Media are spun in favor of these governmental and corporate interests.

The reasons for the existence of this filter are complex, and beyond the scope of this blog post, but I did want to focus on a recent example of this filter in action. This comes from The Sunday Times (a Rupert Murdoch owned paper, see the first filter) published on June 14, 2015. The article in question "British Spies Betrayed to Russians and Chinese" (paywalled here, full text here) claims that Russian and Chinese have obtained the documents stolen by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden, cracked the encryption, with the resulting information threatening British spies, and thereby damaging national security. The key problem with this article, and the reason I am writing about it is that the entire report appears to be based solely on claims made by senior government official who remain anonymous.

As Glenn Greenwald notes, most of the claims made by these anonymous officials are demonstrably false, and the fact that the Sunday Times printed them without bothering to engage in any fact-checking shows how debased and corrupt the mainstream media is. As Greenwald puts it:

The whole article does literally nothing other than quote anonymous British officials. It gives voice to banal but inflammatory accusations that are made about every whistleblower from Daniel Ellsberg to Chelsea Manning. It offers zero evidence or confirmation for any of its claims. The “journalists” who wrote it neither questioned any of the official assertions nor even quoted anyone who denies them. It’s pure stenography of the worst kind: some government officials whispered these inflammatory claims in our ears and told us to print them, but not reveal who they are, and we’re obeying. Breaking!

 As Greenwald goes on to note, the real issue here is that in granting these individuals anonymity, there is no way for anyone to analyze or verify these claims. For all we know (and as seems likely) these individuals were just making stuff up in order to smear Edward Snowden. Because they are hiding behind anonymity, there is no way to evaluate their claims, or hold them accountable if they are in fact lying. Greenwald again:

The official accusers are being hidden by the journalists so nobody can confront them or hold them accountable when it turns out to be false. The evidence can’t be analyzed or dissected because there literally is none: they just make the accusation and, because they’re state officials, their media servants will publish it with no evidence needed. And as is always true, there is no way to prove the negative. It’s like being smeared by a ghost with a substance that you can’t touch.

As Greenwald goes on to note, the problem is compounded when other media outlets pick up and repeat the story, amplifying the lies and misinformation promulgated by the Sunday Times and these anonymous governmental officials. The take away from all of this is provided once again by Greenwald:

Ponder how dumb someone has to be at this point to read an anonymous government accusation, made with zero evidence, and accept it as true.

In closing, I leave you with Stephen Colbert's analysis of this phenomena from his masterful performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner (jump to 10:45):