PolitiFact: Jon Stewart Falsely Claimed FNC Viewers ‘Most Consistently Misinformed’

The Truth-O-Meter has rendered its verdict, and Jon Stewart‘s come up short. PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize winning fact-checking site, has evaluated Stewart’s statement in an interview on Fox News where he asked, “who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers?” Stewart said to Fox’s Chris Wallace. “The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.”

PolitiFact based its verdict on an extensive analysis of recent surveys of Fox News viewers, including a 2007 political knowledge survey by the Pew Research Center, and a 2008 media survey by the University of Maryland‘s Program on International Policy Attitudes.

The analysis is worth a read, and broken down in significant detail, but the conclusion is this: Fox viewers may not be the best informed, but they aren’t the most misinformed:

We have three Pew studies that superficially rank Fox viewers low on the well-informed list, but in several of the surveys, Fox isn’t the lowest, and other general-interest media outlets — such as network news shows, network morning shows and even the other cable news networks — often score similarly low. Meanwhile, particular Fox shows — such as The O’Reilly Factor and Sean Hannity’s show — actually score consistently well, occasionally even outpacing Stewart’s own audience.

(h/t Eric Deggans)

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