No, really. Check out the link.

I thought I'd wait until I had the time to read the actual study, and determine it's validity, before doing so.

...I just thought the board would like to read the story.

& if you don't believe "Faux news" is for morons, check out out some of the ridiculous threads that extreme righties post on this board sometimes------

This reminds me of 1984 actually. In Orwell's distopia, you can see that the powers that be dumbed down language in order to dumb down thought. Complexities in thought were eliminated. "Horrific" or "terrible" become "double plus ungood".

I have seen Fox News use a similar method, of over simplification of news stories, in order to construct a narrative that is essentially incorrect. Hell, their programming is entensionally written at the 4th grade reading level.

That alone is going to produce an ill-informed populace.

Paging Liorr/Rajai !

Fear the turtle

The study claims that Fox followers are more likely to believe "falsehoods."  However, many of the things it mentions are not factual matters that are beyond reasonable dispute.

The first example is the belief of "72 percent believed the health reform law will increase the deficit."  

This inherently implies that health care reform will not, as a matter of established fact, increase the debt, and therefore it is a "falsehood" to believe otherwise.

In fact, there are many reasons why this may not be a falsehood.

Here are two examples:  First, the neutral financial aspect of the law was based on the fact that the would be no "doc fix" for medicare.  If they do the doc fix again, as they have for years, then the facts that were the basis of this premise are incorrect.

Likewise, the deficit neutral aspect is based on assumptions about the economy, the recovery, and a thousand other factors.  If the economy does not grow at the rate predicted, these presumptions will not come to fruition, and the impact will differ accordingly.

As I said, the study is premised on certain facts being accepted as true, and anyone who disagrees is dumber than average.

One of the facts that it mentions is the belief in climate change, with the implication that if you don't believe it is you are stupid.

However, climate change is a theory and intelligent people can disagree.  Just to give one example, Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is clearly an expert in this area, is a scientist, and must be respected in his field, but he is a "skeptic."

However, he would be viewed as "dumb" by a group of social scientists who base stupidity on whether you agree with their views..

Is it really news or is it tabloid?