by is Mooney
Welfare in fact presents a very well documented case study of conservative misinformation during the 1990s, one that seems closely parallel to the health care and global warming debates today.
In an early study (published in the year 2000) on the prevalence of falsehoods in American politics—one that stressed the then-novel distinction between being uninformed and believing strongly in misinformation—political scientist James Kuklinski and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign examined contrasting public views about the facts on this issue. Sure enough, they found that conservatives (or at any rate, those who held strong anti-welfare views) tended to be both more misinformed about welfare, and also more confident they were right in their (wrong) beliefs. In particular, welfare opponents tended to greatly exaggerate the cost of the program, the number of families on welfare, how many of them were African-American, and so on. For instance, only 7 percent of the public was on welfare at the time of the study; but those who exaggerated by answering up to 18 or 25 percent in Kuklinski’s survey were highly confident they were right. Just 1 percent of the federal budget went to welfare, but those who dramatically exaggerated the number—answering up to 11 or 15 percent—were highly confident they were right. And so on.
By the time Fox News came on the air in 1996, then, the trend of providing ideological fare to conservative sophisticates—both highly engaged and confident, and also more misinformed—was already well established. Indeed, Fox’s founder, the former Nixon adviser and television producer Roger Ailes, is a close friend of Rush Limbaugh’s. In the 1990s, Ailes produced a television show for political radio’s most popular personality. Some Fox hosts, like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, are also talk-radio stars, or were at one time—and the audiences for the two media overlap heavily. “I think that by now especially, they’ve become the same people,” says the University of Pittsburgh’s David Barker.
None of which is to suggest that Fox isn’t also guilty of actively misinforming viewers. It certainly is.
The litany of misleading Fox segments and snippets is quite extensive—especially on global warming, where it seems that every winter snowstorm is an excuse for more doubt-mongering. No less than Fox’s Washington managing editor Bill Sammon was found to have written, in a 2009 internal staff email exposed by MediaMatters, that the network’s journalists should:
. . . refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.
And global warming is hardly the only issue where Fox actively misinforms its viewers. The polling data here, from the Project on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) are very telling.
PIPA’s study of misinformation in the 2010 election didn’t just show that Fox News viewers were more misinformed than viewers of other channels. It also showed that watching more Fox made believing in nine separate political misperceptions more likely. And that was a unique effect, unlike any observed with the other news channels that were studied. “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.”
Indeed, this effect was even present in non-Republicans—another indicator that Fox is probably its cause. As Kull explains, “even if you’re a liberal Democrat, you are affected by the station.” If you watched Fox, you were more likely to believe the nine falsehoods, regardless of your political party affiliation.
In summary, then, the “science” of Fox News clearly shows that its viewers are more misinformed than the viewers of other stations, and are this way for ideological reasons. But these are not necessarily the reasons that liberals may assume. Instead, the Fox “effect” probably occurs both because the station churns out falsehoods that conservatives readily accept—falsehoods that may even seem convincing to some liberals on occasion—but also because conservatives are overwhelmingly inclined to choose to watch Fox to begin with.
At the same time, it’s important to note that they’re also disinclined to watch anything else. Fox keeps constantly in their minds the idea that the rest of the media are “biased” against them, and conservatives duly respond by saying other media aren’t worth watching—it’s just a pack of lies. According to Public Policy Polling’s annual TV News Trust Poll (the 2011 run), 72 percent of conservatives say they trust Fox News, but they also say they strongly distrust NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN. Liberals and moderates, in contrast, trust all of these outlets more than they distrust them (though they distrust Fox). This, too, suggests conservative selective exposure.
And there is an even more telling study of “Fox-only” behavior among conservatives, from Stanford’s Shanto Iyengar and Kyu Hahn of Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. They conducted a classic left-right selective exposure study, giving members of different ideological groups the chance to choose stories from a news stream that provided them with a headline and a news source logo—Fox, CNN, NPR, and the BBC—but nothing else. The experiment was manipulated so that the same headline and story was randomly attributed to different news sources. The result was that Democrats and liberals were definitely less inclined to choose Fox than other sources, but spread their interest across the other outlets when it came to news. But Republicans and conservatives overwhelmingly chose Fox for hard news and even for soft news, and ignored other sources. “The probability that a Republican would select a CNN or NPR report was around 10%,” wrote the authors.
In other words—to reiterate a point made earlier—Fox News is both deceiver and enabler simultaneously. Its existence creates the opportunity for conservatives to exercise their biases, by selecting into the Fox information stream, and also by imbibing Fox-style arguments and claims that can then fuel biased reasoning about politics, science, and whatever else comes up.
It’s also likely that conservatives, tending to be more closed-minded and more authoritarian, have a stronger emotional need for an outlet like Fox, where they can find affirmation and escape from the belief challenges constantly presented by the “liberal media.” Their psychological need for something affirmative is probably stronger than what’s encountered on the opposite side of the aisle—as is their revulsion toward allegedly liberal (but really centrist) media outlets.
And thus we once again find, at the root of our political dysfunction, a classic nurture-nature mélange. The penchant for selective exposure is rooted in our psychology and our brains. Closed-mindedness and authoritarianism—running stronger in some of us than in others—likely are as well.
But nevertheless, and just as with consevative think tanks and counterexpertise, it took the development of a broad array of media choices before these tendencies could be fully activated. The seed needed fertile soil in which to grow. Cast it on stony ground—say, the more homogeneous media environment of the 1960s and 1970s, when The New York Times and Washington Post were the “papers of record” and everybody watched the three network channels and PBS—and its growth will be stunted.
Perhaps the fact that early studies of selective exposure sometimes failed, leading psychologists to largely discard the theory—even as now, it has been revived and is coming on strong—itself suggests the potency of this environmental change.
At this point in the book’s narrative, I have laid out three different bodies of evidence that help to build a case about American conservatives’ unique misalignment with reality—and how this misalignment has come to exist.
First, I’ve explored motivated reasoning, and how this emotional and automatic process leads many of us to do just about anything to defend our ident
ities and beliefs—including clinging to wrong ideas and arguing fiercely on their behalf. And I’ve shown some evidence suggesting that this tendency may be more prevalent on the political right (although liberals are certainly not immune to it)—not just motivated reasoning in general, but selective exposure in particular.
Second, I’ve surveyed a large body of research on conservative psychology—finding that conservatives (especially authoritarians) appear to be less Open, less tolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity, less integratively complex, and to have a stronger need for closure.
Finally, I’ve shown how political, social, and technological change in the U.S.—factors like the mobilization of a conservative movement, the proliferation of supporting think tanks and “experts,” a leftward shift of academia in response, and the growth of sympathetic conservative media outlets—have added fuel to the fire. All of these new factors interact with conservative psychology, in such a way as to make the misinformation problem worse.
Now, then, it’s time for a very different kind of evidence. It’s time to look at how factually wrong conservatives actually are. I’ve shown many hints of this throughout the book, but now comes the time to look systematically.
This is a critically important part of the story. It would be one thing to theorize that conservatives are likely to be more dogmatic about incorrect beliefs in a context where there aren’t many real world cases of conservatives being incorrect. People would very understandably wonder why anyone came up with such a theory in the first place.
But that’s not where we find ourselves. The evidence, in this case, is the best support for the theory one could imagine.
Notes
147 “the most consistently misinformed” Fox News Sunday, June 19, 2011. Transcript available online at http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/fox-news-sunday/transcript/defense-secretary-robert-gates-exit-interview-jon-stewart-talks-politics-media-bias?page=6.
147 rated it “false” PolitiFact, “Jon Stewart says those who watch Fox News are the ‘most consistently misinformed media viewers,’” June 20, 2011. Available online at http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jun/20/jon-stewart/jon-stewart-says-those-who-watch-fox-news-are-most/.
147 tizzy at Fox News For an overview of some of the fallout, see Media Matters, “Jon Stewart Gets It Right About Fox News,” June 22, 2011. Available online at http://mediamatters.org/research/201106220022.
148 my calls at that time Chris Mooney, “When Facts Don’t Matter: Proving the Problem With Fox News,” DeSmogBlog, June 29, 2011. Available online at http://www.desmogblog.com/when-facts-don-t-matter-proving-problem-fox-news.
149 widespread public misperceptions about the Iraq war Project on International Policy Attitudes, “Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War,” October 2003. Available online at http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/IraqMedia_Oct03/IraqMedia_Oct03_rpt.pdf.
150 late 2010 survey Jon A. Krosnick and Bo MacInnis, “Frequent Viewers of Fox News Are Less Likely to Accept Scientists’ Views of Global Warming,” December 2010. Available online at http://woods.stanford.edu/docs/surveys/Global-Warming-Fox-News.pdf.
150 much more comprehensive study Lauren Feldman et al, “Climate On Cable: The Nature and Impact of Global Warming Coverage on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC,” International Journal of Press/Politics, in press.
151 an NBC survey NBC News Health Care Survey, August 2009. Questions available online at http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/NEWS/NBC-WSJ_Poll.pdf. However, this does not break down the responses by media viewership. Instead, that interpretation can be found here from NBC: http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2009/08/19/4431138-first-thoughts-obamas-good-bad-news.
151 another survey on public misperceptions about health care Kaiser Family Foundation, “Pop Quiz: Assessing Americans’ Familiarity With the New Health Care Law,” February 2011. Available online at http://www.kff.org/healthreform/upload/8148.pdf.
152 “Ground Zero Mosque” Erik Nisbet and Kelley Garrett, “Fox News Contributes to Spread of Rumors About Proposed NYC Mosque,” October 14, 2010. Available online at http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/kgarrett/MediaMosqueRumors.pdf.
152 misinformation during the 2010 election Program on International Policy Attitudes, “Misinformation and the 2010 Election,” December 2010. Available online at http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/dec10/Misinformation_Dec10_rpt.pdf.
153 “People said, here’s how I would rank that as an influence on my vote” Interview with Steven Kull and Clay Ramsay of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, July 7, 2011.
153 “half-true” PolitiFact, “President Obama says foreign money coming in to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce may be helping to fund attack ads,” October 7, 2011. Available online at http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/oct/11/barack-obama/president-barack-obama-says-foreign-money-coming-u/.
154 “It’s one thing not to be informed” Interview with David Barker, July 7, 2011.
154 “They can tell you who the members of the Supreme Court are” Interview with David Barker, July 7, 2011.
155 after I refuted its analysis Chris Mooney, “Jon Stewart 1, PolitiFact 0: Fox News Viewers Are the Most Misinformed,” DeSmogBlog, June 22, 2010. Available online at http://www.desmogblog.com/jon-stewart-1-politifact-0-fox-news-viewers-are-most-misinformed.
155 PolitiFact failed to correct its error In fairness, PolitiFact received overwhelming criticism on this matter—not surprisingly, since PolitiFact was clearly wrong—and ran a follow up item acknowledging the criticism. But not changing its rating. See Louis Jacobson, “Readers say we were uninformed about Jon Stewart’s claim,” June 21, 2011. Available online http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/jun/21/readers-sound-about-our-false-jon-stewart/.
155 his 1957 book Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957. See chapters 6 and 7, “Voluntary and Involuntary Exposure to Information: Theory,” and “Voluntary and Involuntary Exposure to Information: Data.”
156 “high tariff walls against alien notions” Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Bernard, R. Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet. 1948. The People’s Choice. New York: Columbia University Press.
156 confirmation biases . . . and disconfirmation biases Charles Taber, email communication, July 7, 2011.
157 findings are often described as mixed Shanto Iyengar and Kyu S. Hahn, “Red Media, Blue Media: Evidence of Ideological Selectivity in Media Use,” Journal of Communication, Vol. 59, 2009, 19–39.
157 “Everybody knows this happens” Interview with William Hart, July 11, 2011.
157 selective exposure might be de facto Shanto Iyengar et al, “Selective Exposure to Campaign Communication: The Role of Anticipated Agreement and Issue Public Membership,” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 70, No. 1, 2008, pp. 186–200.
157 statistically rigorous overview of published studies on selective exposure William Hart et al, “Feeling Validated Versus Being Correct: A Meta-Analysis of Selective Exposure to Information,” Psychological Bulletin, 2009, Vol. 135, No. 4, 555–588.
158 often they do [seek out counter-attitudinal information] See R. Kelly Garrett and Paul Resnick, “Resisting Political Fragmentation on the Internet,” Daedalus, Fall 2011. Available online at http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/kgarrett/Assets/GarrettResnick-ResistingPoliticalFragmentation-prepress.pdf.
158 Democrats and liberals didn’t show the same bias Shanto Iyengar et al, “Selective Exposure to Campaign Communication: The Role of Anticipated Agreement and Issue Public Membership,” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 70, No. 1, 2008, pp. 186–200.
159 “highly authoritarian individuals, when threatened . . .” Howard Lavine et al, “Threat, Authoritarianism, and Selective Exposure to Information,” Political Psychology, Vol. 26, No. 2, 2005.
159 an above average amount of selective exposure in right-wing authoritarians For these two studies, see Robert Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 139
–142.
160 “maintain their beliefs against challenges by limiting their experiences” Ibid, p. 111.
160 powerful motivated reasoning study Taber & Lodge, “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs,” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 50, Number 3, July 2006, pp. 755–769.
161 “You grab your coffee and you turn on Fox” Interview with William Hart, July 11, 2011.
162 “the subjective sense of choosing to watch some media and avoid others” Charles Taber, email communication, July 6, 2011.
162 “The more information people are given” Interview with William Hart, July 11, 2011.
162 a particularly ripe environment for selective exposure For a more optimistic take on selective exposure on the Internet, see Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, “Ideological Segregation Online and Offline,” available online at http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/matthew.gentzkow/research/echo_chambers.pdf.
163 political sophisticates David C. Barker, Rushed to Judgment: Talk Radio, Persuasion, and American Political Behavior, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. For this study see Chapter 7.
163 more misinformed about welfare, and also more confident they were right James Kuklinski et al, “Misinformation and the Currency of American Citizenship,” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 62, No. 3, August 2000, pp. 790–816.
164 “they’ve become the same people” Interview with David Barker, July 7, 2011.
164 “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed” Media Matters, “FOXLEAKS: Fox boss ordered staff to cast doubt on climate science,” December 15, 2010. Available online at http://mediamatters.org/blog/201012150004.