As they did last year, researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University have issued a nationwide survey that “confirms” that Fox News Channel viewers are especially uninformed. But Paul Bond at The Hollywood Reporter found this time, an FNC spokesperson blasted the findings and turned the tables on the university, pointing out that its own students don’t exactly measure up academically. (FDU was No. 585 on a Forbes ranking of 650 U.S. colleges.)
“Considering FDU’s undergraduate school is ranked as one of the worst in the country,” said the Fox flack, “we suggest the school invest in improving its weak academic program instead of spending money on frivolous polling – their student body does not deserve to be so ill-informed.”
The poll asked 1,185 people to answer five questions about international news events and four about national news. The average person getting their news from FNC answered 1.08 international questions correctly and 1.04 domestic questions correctly, both of which were lower than viewers of “no news.”
Viewers of MSNBC scored next to last in international questions and third to last on the domestic questions, but liberals ignored that.
But here’s what’s amazing: the Fairleigh Dickinson team didn’t actually identify people who got their news only from one source, as these surveys never seem to do. They used “multinomial logistic regression” to create representations of such people who were then compared “to a hypothetical construct of someone who had no recent news exposure.”
In other words, why would anyone see this as a usable survey?
