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alexholzbach:

Fox News has the most uniformed watchers, according to a study by the University of Maryland.

Too bad the study was overly incorrect and had no conclusive data whatsoever to back up it’s supposed claims. Lee Doren does an amazing job pointing out the major flaws in this study and thus determines that there is absolutely no evidence to conclude that Fox News viewers are less informed than viewers of other news networks.

It has been documented in the past that conservative organizations actually pay bloggers to release or comment on items on the internet, in effect they are paid to play the part of conservative- libertarian trolls. After reviewing this video, I can say that this is also true for this poor ‘analysis.’ Disregarding the conveniently sharp C-SPAN quality videos or the regurgitation of old talking points or the fact that he draws his counterpoints from Eric Rasmussen (who also lists several economists as against, though surprisingly not Krugman, when some of those economists wanted a larger stimulus or economists that butter their breads with the tears of the poor), Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin (Mr. we’ll save $4 trillion by cutting taxes for the rich) and places like the Cato Institute (contrary to popular belief, home of the most amount of trolls on the web, sorry 4chan), Lee Doren’s claims on the report are wildly suspect.

Lee Doren begins by immediately announcing that the report is faulty, rather than begin from a neutral position. In my humble opinion, when the aim is legitimate scientific analysis, impartiality is a must or you begin to seek evidence that primarily supports your claim— no matter how faulty that evidence. His entire positioning is based on the assumption that admitting to faults in a study or research paper is evidence enough to render an analysis invalid. The most difficult part of any research paper, believe me I know, is citing any possible missteps, highlighting doubts and attempting to address them. Contrary to popular belief, it is a very common procedure and the CBO was correct in highlighting a very legitimate aspect of REAL scientific research. I say this as a former researcher who primarily dealt with math intensive genetics research, which very much like economics, has many, many variables to address.

Lee then continues and states, but does not defend, that spending does not create jobs. In addition, perhaps because of a sudden bout of amnesia, Lee proceeds to mathematically, though very poorly, verify that the stimulus created jobs (one of his chief problems with the accuracy of the study.) Furthermore while claiming that the CBO is unreliable, though partially true, he fails to address that many libertarian/ conservative economists also use the CBO as evidence to back their positions. Alex Holzbach, for example, has a little CBO chart that he loves to repeatedly post about the cost of health care. Let me continue,

If the new majority, which counts deficit-cutting as a top priority, insists their repeal bill doesn’t need to be scored by the CBO and continues to undermine CBO’s authority as an independent arbiter of budget estimates, it’s going to be very hard indeed to move on to debates about budget reform, particularly around the entitlement programs Republicans want to rein in. It’s especially difficult if the press pretends that polls are an accurate way to measure the cost of legislation. And it’s not as if Republicans don’t like citing the CBO: They love to point out that this is a “$1 trillion” health-care reform, because that’s the cost of the bill when you don’t mention the offsets. They like to point out the stimulative effects of tax cuts. They’re even using CBO estimates to wiggle out from under their plan to cut the budget by $100 billion.

But when the CBO disagrees with their interpretation, Republicans just take the CBO out of the equation. You have to admire the realpolitik, but the move means that future efforts to find common ground between the parties will start off on different planets. [source]

Another example of MY FACTS ARE FACTS AND YOUR FACTS ARE NOT FACTS. [Ezra Klein has something on this as the CBO has come under increasing scrutiny] However unlike his evidence from places like The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, the CBO is a nonpartisan agency. Nor was anyone in the CBO up for re-election unlike Rep. Paul Ryan at the time.

Near the end he also draws attention to two other questions that he believes aren’t even worth going into detail.

  1. The Birther Controversy which he claims that no Fox News host ever affirmatively pushed that myth. Disregarding report after report to the contrary, Fox News certainly gave plenty of air-time to birth certificate deniers, as they do with climate skeptics. Whether or not you believe those lunatics, it is still being fed to Fox News viewers and THUS, surprise surprise, misinforms them. Even a simple general search is enough to provide sufficient evidence to this claim by Lee Doren.

    Myth Busted: 1, 2, 3, etc…

  2. The ThinkProgress report on foreign funding being used in American elections. This is a point that he doesn’t even attempt to address and one that the Chamber of Commerce poorly denies. [source]

    The Chamber’s Tita Freeman did not dispute that the Chamber’s 501(c)(6) organization running attack ads receives foreign funds, and simply claimed, “We have a system in place” to prevent foreign funding for the Chamber’s “political activities.”
  3. Even much more conservative positions agree that the Chamber of Commerce solicited funds from foreign sources. [source] Though ThinkProgress followed initial claims with evidence of at least $885,000 from over 80 companies in disclosed funds. [source]

    Again, all of these annual dues are collected in the same 501(c)(6) the Chamber is using to run partisan attack ads. The data above reflects information from public sources, and the Chamber likely has many more foreign corporations as dues-paying members — but refuses to divulge any of the funders for their ad campaign. Unfortunately, many reporters in the traditional press covered the Chamber story, but missed the entire point of our reporting. Most reporters (from the New York Times, McClatchy, the Associated Press, etc.) never contacted ThinkProgress, instead opting to only interview Chamber officials. [source]

    After all, wasn’t this one of the reasons as to why the Citizens United ruling was hated and  thus prompted ThinkProgress to begin to address the problems of foreign funding almost immediately? [source]

    Was Rachel Maddow talking supposed to be evidence enough to disprove the claims?

All in all, the video dedicates probably 3 minutes total to actual discussion of hard evidence and 18 minutes of slow, rehashed rhetoric, with assumptions, that we’ve all been drilled with by now. The individual who created the video loves to highlight numbers, entire random texts and titles, zoom in on names, though not Nobel Laureates (???), that we’re supposed to believe are important but he fails to provide research or a counter study to offset the claims in the report. You know how they do stuff with real science… This is classic distortion for the sake of proving a point, a point that is loosely grounded and fails to address or attack the real problem, why are Fox News viewers slightly more misinformed than MSNBC or CNN? Of course, this won’t stop Fox News from denouncing the claims, akin to this video, with little evidence. These 21 minutes and 9 seconds could have been utilized appropriately by addressing methods that Fox viewers could use to vary their sources or address why some of these controversies are not controversies at all, perhaps educating the masses in the process so that the next report won’t produce the same results.

TLDR: MY FACTS ARE FACTS AND YOUR FACTS ARE NOT FACTS even if those facts are drawn from the same place.

(Source: alexholzbach)

Notes

  1. iuwaehfoaiuwhefoiaulfjqn reblogged this from jonathan-cunningham and added:
    holy shit rebuttal
  2. silas216 reblogged this from jonathan-cunningham
  3. redgee reblogged this from mohandasgandhi
  4. alexholzbach reblogged this from thenoobyorker and added:
    Oh boy. I absolutely love liberals thay say nothing of substance and immediately claim they’ve won an argument. You...
  5. jonathan-cunningham reblogged this from thenoobyorker
  6. ramblinboy reblogged this from greenstate
  7. itemforty reblogged this from greenstate
  8. shortformblog reblogged this from greenstate and added:
    … (more good stuff here) BOOM. ROASTED. Personally we just stopped listening...worth our...
  9. greenstate reblogged this from thenoobyorker
  10. mohandasgandhi reblogged this from thenoobyorker and added:
    Another win. TheNoobYorker - 9,999,999,999,999,999… Republicans - Huh?
  11. thenoobyorker reblogged this from alexholzbach and added:
    been documented in...past that conservative organizations actually pay bloggers
  12. allieeebabyyy reblogged this from alexholzbach
  13. alexholzbach posted this