Warning: Fox May Be Hazardous to Your Brain!

Perhaps Fox should be required to display a warning label like the ones on cigarette packages.  While some know that Fox, with other Murdoch publications, is the greatest source of disinformation on the world today, we now have proof that Fox viewers are the most misinformed voters in America.

Last week, World Public Opinion (WPO) released a poll exploring political information in a post-Citizens United national election and found that 90 percent of voters “said that in the 2010 election they encountered information they believed was misleading or false, with 56% saying this occurred frequently.” More troubling, the poll also found “strong evidence that voters were substantially misinformed on many of the key issues of the campaign.” WPO said that voter misinformation contained beliefs about current issues such as TARP, the Recovery Act, health care reform, the economy, and climate change that were “at odds with the conclusions of government agencies, generally regarded as non-partisan, consisting of professional economists and scientists.”

WPO found one bright spot in its lengthy report [PDF]: “Those who had greater exposure to news sources were generally better informed. In the great majority of cases, those with higher levels of exposure to news sources had lower levels of misinformation.” However, there was one exception [PDF], Fox News… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Think Progress>

I strongly recommend you click through to the PDF file, which is the entire report.  The results boggle the mind.  Here’s one brief excerpt:

Those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that:

• most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely)
• most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)
• the economy is getting worse (26 points)
• most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)
• the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)
• their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)
• the auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)
• when TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)
• and that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points)

And this is just a drop in the bucket.

Again, as I have said so many times before, there can be no doubt that Fox is the Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda.