Over at Desmogblog, Chris Mooney has a piece up with a couple references to studies that ask people questions about well known events or issues and see how people do. Turns out that on at least five different issues, global warming, the Iraq war, healthcare, the Ground Zero Mosque and the 2010 election, people who watched more Fox news were more likely to get the answers wrong.

I don’t have time to go through all the studies–although, they’re not all studies, some are just surveys and lack some depth of analysis–so I just looked at the one that overlaps most with my interests: healthcare.

The survey asked around 1200 people whether ten provisions of the recent American healthcare act were part of the law or not. Five of the provisions were part and five weren’t. On average people only got 65% of the questions right which isn’t much better than chance (if you randomly answer yes or no to ten questions on average you’d get 50% right). Also, people were more likely to correctly answer that a provision was in the act and less likely to get it right when the provision wasn’t in the act meaning that people tended to just assume more things were in the bill.

25% of the respondents got 7 or more questions right. Of people who reported getting their information from Fox News, 25% scored 7 or more while, of people who watched CNN or MSNBC, 35 and 39% got 7 or more right respectively. That’s an entire question better than Fox News. But what’s interesting is that people who watched Fox did exactly as well as the average suggesting that, in fact, Fox News while clearly not informative on this issue, might not be misleading people either. Of course, if people want to the facts on this issue, they should still be watching CNN or MSNBC.

We should also remember that these numbers are probably also tainted by party affiliations. CNN and MSNBC viewers are probably more likely to support the healthcare act and therefore know more about it than Fox News viewers meaning that part of this effect could be due to the relationship between where people are on the political spectrum and what they watch.

Although Mooney is implying that this survey supports the theory that Fox News is misinforming people, as much as it pains me to say it, I think it’s more likely to suggest that Fox News is simply not informing people on this topic. If Fox was actively misinforming people, wouldn’t you expect their viewers to be worse than the average? Still, this does lead me to wonder where the people who did worse than the average Fox News viewer are getting their information.