Former Bush adviser: "Fox News is hurting the Republican party"

As reported by Alana Horowitz of HuffingtonPost, Bruce Bartlett, who formerly served in the administrations of both Ronald Reagen and George W. Bush, has authored a study of viewers of Fox News.

He confirms previous studies that show viewers of Fox News tend to be "less informed about current affairs than people who watch mainstream news -- and even people who don't watch the news at all."

Bartlett writes:  "Republican voters get so much of their news from Fox, which cheerleads whatever their candidates are doing or saying, that they suffer from wishful thinking and fail to see that they may not be doing as well as they imagine, or that their ideas are not connecting outside the narrow party base."

Specifically, they tend to have misguided beliefs about the Iraq War, the Affordable Care Act, and others, and to be biased against Muslims.   And Bartlet concludes that "It appears that right-wing bias, including inaccurate reporting, became commonplace on Fox . . . [such that] "many conservatives now refuse to even listen to any news or opinion not vetted through Fox, and to believe whatever appears on it as the gospel truth."

Even some Republican politicans are now expressing concern, including Newt Gingrich in 2012 (despite his frequent appearances on Fox).   Former Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) said last year that some Fox shows are "totally not fair and totally not balanced."

We liberals have been saying it for years.   It's with a bit of schadenfreude that I gloat over that concern now cropping up in their own upper ranks.

Now what I want to see are similar studies of the viewers of MSNBC.   The right counters criticism of Fox by claiming that MSNBC is biased toward the left.   I'd like to see comparative studies of the degree of "being well informed about current events" between the two sets of viewers.

I agree that MSNBC news programs consistently lean leftward in their emphasis;  but I do not believe that this extends to distortions or incorrect reporting.   I am quite confident that MSNBC viewers would score far better than Fox News viewers on a quiz about current events.    Bring it on.

Ralph