Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Politifact Rates 'Misinformed' Jon Stewart's Fox Claims As False

Inviting far left liberal idealist and comedian on to Fox News for an interview with Chris Wallace... what could go wrong?

Stewart claimed that Fox viewers are the "most consistently" misinformed viewers and Politifact decided to fact check Stewart's claims and found them patently false.

AmSpec points to the Politifact piece and notices that particular shows such as The O'Reilly Factor and Sean Hannity's show consistently scored well on the knowledge meter, even better in some cases than Stewart's show and AmSpec asks "Could it be that Jon Stewart is America's most consistently misinformed talk show host?

Now I don't know whether Stewart is aware the studies he has cited were funded by Soros. If Stewart isn't aware, that tells me he doesn't care where he gets his information. As long as an organization is ready to put out negative information about the FNC, then he will accept it at face value. Why? Because it's what he and millions of liberals want to hear. Stewart and his ideological ilk want to hear that conservatives and Republicans are stupid and evil. But if he is aware that Soros funded these studies, then it could be said that Stewart is relentlessly promoting an ideological agenda under the rubric of a comedy show. In which case, Stewart has become precisely what he is purportedly lampooning.


The Daily Mail reports that Stewart complains of being "edited" and made to seem like he was a woman having a nervous breakdown, yet in the Wallace/Stewart interview Stewart himself admits "There is no question I do not tell the entire story."

The think I found the most amusing is when Stewart maintains "The bias of the mainstream media is towards sensationalism, conflict and laziness." He said this as he was denying that mainstream media has a liberal bias while harping that Fox News has a conservative bias.

Since Stewart is fond of surveys, studies and polls, then it is worth mentioning that every poll conducted for years, even decades, shows the American public see a media bias, with the more seeing a liberal media bias.

In 2009 Gallup found that three times the amount of Americans found media to be "too liberal" than those saying "too conservative", 45 percent to 15 percent and 35 percent described it as "just about right." Gallup notes that these findings have not changed much since 2005.

In 2010 Gallup asked the same question and the "too liberal" number jumped three more percentage points to 48 percent with the "too conservative" staying steady at 15 percent and those thinking the media report "just about right" dropped to 33 percent.

Pew Research also asked the question in 2009 with graphs comparing the changes since 1985, and found that the public does not trust the accuracy of how the media reports the news and on the issue of bias, Pew found 60 percent of the public believes news organizations are politically biased with 50 percent believing it is liberally biased and 22 percent believing it is conservatively biased.

So when Stewart insists that Fox News, which has consistently rated as the top cable news channel with viewers, doubling and tripling the viewership of MSNBC, CNN and Headline News, consistently for years and years, is biased, but the others channels and news organizations are not biased "towards a liberal agenda," it seems that Mr. Stewart is on the short end of that stick disagreeing with the most Americans at best and completely "misinformed" at worst.

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