While it goes without saying that there are serious questions about Fox news' journalistic balance, it could be assumed that even biased opinions on reported events would raise awareness about those events themselves. Unfortunately this might not be the case, as a study by Fairleigh Dickerson University suggests.
In response to questions about middle east events, people who watched FOX news were less able to judge how things had actually turned out, than people with no news source at all.
Since naturally this has prevoked a response (albeit the ones I saw were mainly of the blog with US-flag-and-rattlesnake-logo variety, which does indicate a certain disposition to start with) it is worth checking out the original survey results themselves, available here on the university website.
This should help counter any superficial rejections of the study's methodology. For example, said rattlesnake website claimed that the figures presented didn't show FOX news as the ONLY news source, but only perhaps as one of many. The logic being that then FOX news couldn't be solely blamed. Alas this blogger probably knows less about logic and statistics than actual rattlesnakes, but maybe a simple analogy would help explain the situation. If I put my hand into 3 boxes, with rabbits and hamsters, rabbits and rattlesnakes, and rabbits, rattlesnakes and hamsters, respectively, and get bitten in the last 2 but not the first, then it doesn't take much of a jump of logic to know which pet not to get my kids.
The main point to be drawn from this is I think not that FOX news is a terrible news source (this is more obvious than the pet question), but that its style of news is not just uninformative, but actually detrimental, which is not something even I would have expected. More studies would be needed to tease out exactly why this is the case, but several possibilities come to mind.
Overall tone overrides the message
Just as the imagery in adverts etc. can be shown to override any accompanying (and even contradictory) verbal message, it could be the overall tone of FOX news drowns out any factual reporting. Maybe the average viewer is aware of US diplomatic battles with Syria, and so assumes any revolt against Assad has succeeded (with God, or at least Uncle Sam on their side how could it not?), whereas there is no such preconception informing the Egyptian uprising. Indeed maybe something like Obama's famous speech in Cairo linked him to Egypt, and hence any average FOX-viewer prejudice against him would feed into other questions.
The unmentioned better than the dismissed.
Another possibility is that since things like the Egyptian revolt (successful Islamic overthrow of dictator without foreign intervention) didn't fit the FOX narrative, it was so played down on the channel that its viewers also absorbed a distain and active un-interest in it, and hence were basically purely guessing when asked. People without an admitted, chosen, news source of course don't live in an isolationist bubble, and are still going to be aware indirectly of world events, just by channel surfing, or even seeing news headlines on paper stands etc. So even if they don't actively care, it may still be able to catch their attention momentarily, and thus inform them, raising their chance to answer the question, above chance. I.e. maybe FOX news turns people off certain things, and hence makes them more ignorant.
Suits us, but still means something
Of course, the reason this study has gone viral has to be admitted to be largely to the antipathy and disgust with which most people view FOX news, and so any scientific evidence confirming our opinions is going to be jumped on. But regardless of this, the bottom line is there is statistical evidence to show bad news is worse than no news, and this goes beyond FOX, but ties into the wider debate about how important matters are handled by society.
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