Courtesy of MoveOn

we are the chumpions

In the celebrated encounter the other day on The Daily Show between Jon Stewart and FOX News presenter Chris Wallace, Stewart several times made the point that habitual FOX News watchers were on average more ignorant than the rest of the population.

(He was, by the way, perfectly correct in this assertion. You might, I guess, dispute the polls' methodology -- although no one to my knowledge has ever made a serious attempt to do -- but Stewart's assertion is nothing more than a statement of truth.)

The FOX News website, Fox Nation, was not going to take this lying down, no sirree. As Joshua Holland reported on AlterNet,

The site answered Stewart by posting the results of some Fox viewer polls and then asking, "Does this sound misinformed to you?"

• 91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs
• 72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit
• 72 percent believe the economy is getting worse
• 60 percent believe climate change is not occurring

So more than half of FOX News viewers, and in one case 91%, believe in things that can easily be, and frequently have been, demonstrated to be comprehensively false . . . and this is supposed to indicate they're not misinformed?