Fox News Is Making You Dumber

In 2012, a research team at Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind poll set out to answer a straightforward question: how well do Americans who consume different news sources understand basic current events? The study was not designed to embarrass any particular network. It was designed to measure knowledge, the kind of factual awareness a functioning democracy requires of its citizens in order to make informed decisions.

The researchers surveyed 1,185 Americans nationwide. They asked each respondent which news sources they had consumed in the previous week, then posed a set of questions about domestic and international affairs. The questions were not obscure or tricky. They covered things like which party controls the House of Representatives, what economic sanctions against Iran are intended to accomplish, and whether the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Syria had succeeded in overthrowing their governments. The kind of basic information that anyone following the news in any meaningful capacity should know.

The results produced a ranking that has since been replicated, cited, and expanded upon by researchers across multiple institutions and disciplines. NPR listeners scored highest. Viewers of Sunday morning political talk shows scored nearly as well. Viewers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a comedy program, outperformed viewers of every cable news network.

Fox News viewers scored lowest. Not just among cable news viewers. Among everyone. People who reported consuming no news at all answered more questions correctly than people whose primary news source was Fox News.

The lead researcher, Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson, was explicit about what the data showed. Controlling for education, partisanship, and other demographic variables, the study found that Fox News had a measurable negative effect on knowledge. Someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer 1.04 out of 5 domestic questions correctly, a score significantly worse than someone who reported watching no news of any kind. On international affairs the pattern held, with Fox News viewers scoring 1.08 out of 4 questions correctly, again behind those who consumed no news at all.

Not One Study

The Fairleigh Dickinson findings were not an anomaly. They were a data point in a growing body of research that consistently arrives at the same conclusion.

In 2010, two years before the Fairleigh Dickinson study, researchers at the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes conducted a similar analysis following the 2010 midterm elections. They surveyed 848 voters and found that greater exposure to Fox News was associated with increased misinformation on a range of factual questions, including the state of the economy, climate science, and the content of the Affordable Care Act. The more someone watched Fox News, the more misinformed they became, and this effect was not explained by partisan identity. It held even after controlling for political affiliation.

In 2020, a study published in Frontiers in Psychology by Lindsay Dhanani and Franz at the University of Delaware examined how media consumption patterns affected Americans’ knowledge about COVID-19, their endorsement of pandemic-related misinformation, and their levels of prejudice toward Asian Americans during the early months of the crisis. Fox News viewers demonstrated lower factual knowledge about how the virus spreads, higher rates of belief in misinformation about treatments and origins, and significantly higher levels of prejudice toward Asian Americans. Those who consumed NPR and the New York Times scored higher on knowledge, lower on misinformation endorsement, and expressed substantially lower levels of racial prejudice.

In 2022, researchers at Yale and several other institutions designed one of the most rigorous tests of Fox News’s effect on viewers ever conducted. They recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers, verified their viewing habits through actual television data rather than self-reporting, and paid them to switch to CNN for a month. The researchers then measured whether the switch changed the participants’ factual beliefs. It did. Viewers who switched from Fox to CNN became measurably more accurate in their understanding of current events, even though they remained politically conservative. When the incentive ended and participants returned to Fox News, their factual accuracy reverted.

This study is significant because it addresses the most common objection to the earlier research: that Fox News does not cause misinformation but merely attracts people who are already misinformed. The Yale study showed that when you change the input, the output changes. Fox News viewers who were given accurate information updated their factual beliefs accordingly. When the accurate information was removed and replaced with Fox News, the misinformation returned. The effect is causal, not merely correlational.

How Information Displacement Works

The question the data raises is not whether Fox News viewers are less informed. That is established. The question is why. What is the mechanism by which watching more news makes a person know less than someone who watches none?

The answer lies in what researchers describe as information displacement. Fox News does not leave viewers with no information. It leaves them with false information that occupies the cognitive space where accurate information would otherwise reside. The viewer is not uninformed. They are misinformed, which is measurably worse because a person who knows nothing is at least open to learning. A person who believes something false will actively resist the correct information because accepting it requires first admitting they were wrong.

This is a critical distinction. An uninformed person has an empty glass. A misinformed person has a gla