Tuesday, October 13, 2009
News 'Daily Show' dissects CNN
Posted by Andisheh Nouraee on Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 2:18 PM
In 2003, a WorldPublicOpinion.org study revealed regular viewers of Fox News believed more falsehoods about the Iraq war than viewers of other TV networks, print news readers, and public broadcasting listeners and viewers.
I recall a lot of chatter at the time about how the study "proved" Fox serially misleads its viewers, but very little discussion of the poor results of other news outlets.
For example, 55 percent of CNN viewers polled believed to be true at least one major falsehood about the Iraq war. CNN viewers were way less misinformed about Iraq than Fox viewers, but no one at CNN should have been pleased to hear that a majority of its viewers fundamentally misunderstood the biggest news event of the year.
I don't have a crew of researchers with retina and brain scanners to understand why watching TV news leaves people misinformed, but I have a guess: the preferred TV news way of exploring an issue is to have two shouty partisan hacks yell at each other. The shouting is "moderated" by a host who typically doesn't have a firm enough grasp of the facts to call bullshit when necessary. The result: the networks broadcast a lot of bullshit that sounds factual because no one actually called it bullshit during the broadcast.
Fox is loathsome in this regard, but I can tolerate it in part because its GOP hackery is transparent to all but the most deluded.
Hometown favorite CNN, however, infuriates me. It positions itself as the most trust name in news (translation: you can't trust the other guys) but still amplifies the voices of lying liars without pointing out the lies.
That's all just a roundabout way of saying I enjoyed this clip from the Daily Show about CNN:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| CNN Leaves It There | ||||
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