A conservative takes on Fox News
Bruce Bartlett has worked for two Republican presidents – Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
He’s now a historian.
He’s published an extensive report on the state of conservative media titled, “How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics.”
It’s jaw-dropping.
Bartlett concludes that conservatives who use Fox and other right-wing news outlets as their primary news sources, engage in “self-brainwashing.”
Heck! I’d already known that. I’ve maintained a strict “No political arguments with admitted Fox News watchers” policy for years.
So, it’s heartening that one of the champions of Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics – Bartlett – would publish a report about how Fox News traffics in misleading, self-serving, and, sometimes, dishonest “reporting.”
Bartlett freely admits that MSNBC leans to the left. But he cites a number of studies that indicate MSNBC’s viewers aren’t nearly as misinformed as those people who get a steady diet of Fox News.
Bartlett says a 2011 Farleigh Dickinson University survey indicates that “Fox viewers were consistently more likely to have an incorrect understanding (of foreign and domestic issues) than those getting their news elsewhere.”
He then writes about a follow-up study in which Farleigh Dickinson University asked New Jersey residents four questions about foreign and domestic policy issues.
Fox News watchers even answered fewer questions correctly than did regular viewers of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”
And worse, Farleigh Dickinson released a national poll in January of this year.
For instance, if you believe “American Forces Found an Active Weapons of Mass Destruction Program in Iraq,” or if you still think “President Obama is Not Legally a Citizen of the United States,” you might be among the 30 percent of the Fox News viewers who (definitely or probably) agree with those false statements.
CNN, MSNBC and “Daily Show” watchers are far more likely to believe otherwise.
Bartlett isn’t the only conservative who has misgivings about the influences of Fox News.
Tom Coburn, the former conservative U.S. senator from Oklahoma, once remarked, “There are certain shows on Fox I can’t watch. Because they’re totally not fair and totally not balanced,” he said about the network that prides itself (for some reason) on being “fair and balanced.”
After former House Speaker Newt Gingrich left Congress, he became a Fox News analyst.
“One of the real changes that comes when you start running for President – as opposed to being an analyst for Fox is I have to actually know what I’m talking about,” Gingrich said during the 2012 presidential campaign.
Massaging facts for adoring TV audiences is one thing. But when those massaged facts could be used to affect public policy – that’s a more serious problem.
In 2012, when Mitt Romney was videotaped telling his potential campaign donors that 47 percent of Americans are dependent on the government because they “pay no income taxes,” he was taking his cue from the repeated Fox News claim that there are armies of Americans who don’t pay any taxes.
The fact is, even though those people may not pay incomes taxes, they do pay other taxes. A distinction that seemed to escape Fox News, and which helped contribute to Mitt Romney never being known as President Romney.
Fox News’ “makers vs. takers” theme is a network staple.
That was the case in 2013, when Fox unveiled its special titled “The Great Food Stamp Binge.”
They highlighted a surfer, Jason Greenslate, who bragged about living carefree from his welfare payments.
It doesn’t matter that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has clearly stated that the food stamp program (SNAP) only has a one percent rate of fraud and waste.
After Fox aired its food stamp special, copies were delivered to members of Congress.
Last month, the House Committee on Agriculture held hearings about the SNAP program.
Several Republican House members used “the surfer that was on one of the news channels,” as an example of the widespread misuse of food stamps.
But none of them mentioned the 4.7 million people that SNAP keeps out of poverty.
Fox News never told them to say that.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net