“Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers?” The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart asked Chris Wallace this weekend on Fox News Sunday. “The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.”
Actually, though, he was the one misinforming the viewers.
PolitiFact looked at three different surveys, which showed mixed results. One June 2010 survey showed that “Fox actually scored better than its two direct cable-news rivals — MSNBC, which is a liberal counterpoint to Fox, and CNN, which is considered more middle-of-the-road. Also scoring lower than Fox were local television news, the evening network news shows and the network morning shows.”
Interestingly, one Fox News show seemed to score particularly well. As PolitiFact noted, a Pew study showed that: “Viewers of at least one show on Fox scored quite well — The O’Reilly Factor, of whom 51 percent made it into the high knowledge group. That made it equal to National Public Radio — a longtime target of conservative complaints about liberal media bias — and only three percentage points behind Stewart’s own show, at 54 percent.
(In another survey, Hannity & Colmes actually exceeded Jon Stewart’s Daily Show).
PolitiFact’s ultimate conclusion about Stewart’s claim: “It’s simply not true that “every poll” shows that result. So we rate his claim False.”