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 glass full of something contaminated. You cannot fill a glass that is already full, even if what is in it is poison. The person has to first recognize what they have been drinking and choose to pour it out. And the entire architecture of Fox News’s programming is designed to ensure that never happens.

Fox News achieves this displacement through a specific structural feature of its programming that distinguishes it from other news sources. The network presents opinion content in formats that are indistinguishable from news reporting. The visual cues are identical: the anchor desk, the chyrons, the breaking news graphics, the tone of authority. Viewers who lack media literacy, which is a skill, not an intelligence measure, process opinion as news because nothing in the presentation signals that they should do otherwise.

The result is that a Fox News viewer who watches three hours of evening programming believes they have consumed three hours of news. They have not. They have consumed a small amount of selectively reported factual content embedded in a large volume of editorial narrative, emotional provocation, and tribal reinforcement, all delivered through the visual grammar of legitimate journalism. They believe they are informed because they feel informed. And the feeling of being informed is, for the human brain, functionally indistinguishable from actually being informed.

The Dunning-Kruger Dimension

This mechanism interacts with one of the most well-documented findings in cognitive psychology: the Dunning-Kruger effect. In 1999, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger at Cornell University demonstrated that people who are least competent in a given domain are also the least capable of recognizing their incompetence. They consistently overestimate their abilities because they lack the very skills that would allow them to see what they are missing.

Fox News exploits this dynamic at industrial scale. It tells viewers that they are the smart ones. It tells them the experts are lying, the scientists are corrupt, the professors are brainwashing children, the journalists are manufacturing propaganda. The message is not just that Fox News is right. The message is that you, the viewer, are smarter than the people who spent decades acquiring expertise in their fields. You can see what they cannot. You have been chosen to see through the lies.

This is the most addictive product Fox News sells. Not information. Not political perspective. The feeling of intellectual superiority without any of the work that intellectual achievement requires. A person who has been told they are smarter than doctors, scientists, and professors will not voluntarily give up that feeling by exposing themselves to information that demonstrates they are not. Returning to reality means returning to being ordinary. And Fox News has ensured that ordinary feels like failure.

The Prejudice Connection

The Frontiers in Psychology research adds a dimension that the knowledge studies alone do not capture. Fox News does not merely reduce factual knowledge. It actively increases prejudice.

The mechanism is direct. Fox News’s editorial framework consistently associates threats, whether economic, cultural, or physical, with specific out-groups: immigrants, Muslims, Black Americans, Asian Americans, liberals. This association is repeated across programs, across segments, across years. The cumulative effect is not that viewers consciously adopt prejudiced beliefs. It is that the association between the out-group and the threat becomes automatic, embedded in the viewer’s pattern recognition system below the level of conscious deliberation.

This is why Fox News viewers who are asked directly whether they hold prejudiced views often deny it sincerely. They do not experience their biases as prejudice. They experience them as common sense, as pattern recognition, as self-evident truth. The association has been so deeply reinforced through repetition that it feels like observation rather than indoctrination.

The Scale of the Problem

Fox News has been the most-watched cable news network in the United States for over two decades. At its peak, its prime-time programming drew audiences of over 3 million nightly viewers, with total daily reach extending to tens of millions across its television, radio, and digital platforms.

The research consistently shows that this audience is, on measurable dimensions of factual knowledge, less informed than people who consume no news at all. They hold higher rates of factually incorrect beliefs. They demonstrate higher levels of prejudice toward racial and ethnic minorities. They are more susceptible to conspiracy theories. And they are more resistant to correction because the network has preemptively inoculated them against any source that might provide accurate information by labeling every such source as fake, biased, or part of a liberal conspiracy.

This is not a political observation. It is a public health problem. A democracy in which a significant percentage of the electorate is systematically misinformed by the primary source they trust most for information cannot function as a democracy. It can only function as a contest between people who know what is happening and people who have been trained to believe they know what is happening when they do not.

The glass is not empty. It is full. And what it is full of is making the country dumber, more prejudiced, and less capable of the shared factual foundation that democratic self-governance requires.

The research is not ambiguous. The evidence is not mixed. Fox News is making its viewers less informed than if they watched nothing at all. The studies have been conducted. The data has been published. The findings have been replicated.

The only people who do not know this are the people still watching.

Sources

Dan Cassino, “What You Know Depends on What You Watch: Current Events Knowledge Across Popular News Sources,” Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind Poll, May 2012

Clay Ramsay et al., “Misinformation and the 2010 Election,” University of Maryland Program on International Policy Attitudes, December 2010

Lindsay Dhanani and Berkley Franz, “The Role of News Media Consumption and Trust in Public Health Knowledge, COVID-19 Misinformation Endorsement, and Prejudice Toward Asian Americans,” Frontiers in Psychology, Volume 11, October 2020

David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, “The Manifold Effects of Partisan Media on Viewers’ Beliefs and Attitudes: A Field Experiment with Fox News Viewers,” Yale University, 2022

Homero Gil de Zuniga, Rebecca Scheffauer, and Bingbing Zhang, “Cable News Use and Conspiracy Theories: Exploring Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC Effects on People’s Conspiracy Mentality,” Journal of Communication, 2023

David Dunning and Justin Kruger, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999

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