Fox News Is Making You Dumber

In 2012, a research team at Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind poll set out to answer a straightforward question: how well do Americans who consume different news sources understand basic current events? The study was not designed to embarrass any particular network. It was designed to measure knowledge, the kind of factual awareness a functioning democracy requires of its citizens in order to make informed decisions.

The researchers surveyed 1,185 Americans nationwide. They asked each respondent which news sources they had consumed in the previous week, then posed a set of questions about domestic and international affairs. The questions were not obscure or tricky. They covered things like which party controls the House of Representatives, what economic sanctions against Iran are intended to accomplish, and whether the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Syria had succeeded in overthrowing their governments. The kind of basic information that anyone following the news in any meaningful capacity should know.

The results produced a ranking that has since been replicated, cited, and expanded upon by researchers across multiple institutions and disciplines. NPR listeners scored highest. Viewers of Sunday morning political talk shows scored nearly as well. Viewers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a comedy program, outperformed viewers of every cable news network.

Fox News viewers scored lowest. Not just among cable news viewers. Among everyone. People who reported consuming no news at all answered more questions correctly than people whose primary news source was Fox News.

The lead researcher, Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson, was explicit about what the data showed. Controlling for education, partisanship, and other demographic variables, the study found that Fox News had a measurable negative effect on knowledge. Someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer 1.04 out of 5 domestic questions correctly, a score significantly worse than someone who reported watching no news of any kind. On international affairs the pattern held, with Fox News viewers scoring 1.08 out of 4 questions correctly, again behind those who consumed no news at all.

Not One Study

The Fairleigh Dickinson findings were not an anomaly. They were a data point in a growing body of research that consistently arrives at the same conclusion.

In 2010, two years before the Fairleigh Dickinson study, researchers at the University of Ma