Jon Stewart is much more brave than Tim Pawlenty. He’s willing to bring his criticisms about Fox News right to the source. He’s much more blunt in this interview with Chris Wallace than he ever is on The Daily Show.
Steve Benen follows up with some facts about Fox News viewers and their misinformation:
The quantifiable evidence is overwhelming. Eight years ago, just six months into the war in Iraq, the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland found that those who relied on the Republican network were “three times more likely than the next nearest network to hold all three misperceptions — about WMD in Iraq, Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11, and foreign support for the U.S. position on the war in Iraq.”
As Ben Armbruster noted a while back, “An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll out [in 2009] found that Fox News viewers were overwhelmingly misinformed about health care reform proposals. A 2008 Pew study ranked Fox News last in the number of ‘high knowledge’ viewers and a 2007 Pew poll ranked Fox viewers as the least knowledgeable about national and international affairs.”
This comes as a surprise to no one except Fox viewers and Chris Wallace. Try as we might, the budding left-wing media has not been able to change this much. The media is still more afraid of being called liberal than of being called uniformative.