Comments on: The Fox in the Tea Party

By: M.C.McBride

M.C.McBride — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:21:56 +0000

I enjoyed reading this article. The posts are good too.

By: BajaArizona

BajaArizona — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 02:36:19 +0000

Fox News viewers are also consistently the most poorly informed regarding the facts of current events.

A critical piece of the puzzle in understanding how Fox functions is a phenomena discovered by a pair of cognition scientists.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their very incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes.

The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority.

Kruger and Dunning conclude, “the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others”.

This is an elucidation of the eternal mystery of why stupid people often feel intellectually superior to “eggheads”.

Now you may commence weeping for the future.

By: Bob9999

Bob9999 — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:56:55 +0000

It’s hard to believe that the public interest is well served by a constant barrage of misinformation and disinformation disguised as objective reporting.

By: FutilityofTed

FutilityofTed — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:54:52 +0000

If Fox News was not on the air it you would get the impression that everything liberal politicians do is dandy and everything republicans do is to protect the rich. If Fox is only weakly countered by MSNBC (and CNN) it is because the network news watching audience tends to favor a conservative viewpoint, not because the converage itself is any less biased.