I’m a fan of TPM, but an article like this cannot pass without criticism:
Trust in Fox News has fallen to a new low in the four-year history of Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling’s survey of TV news. The latest survey, released Wednesday, found that 41 percent of respondents trust the network, while 46 percent do not. In 2010, 49 percent trusted Fox, and 37 percent did not. But respondents also chose Fox News as the most trustworthy TV news outlet when given a list of the organizations PPP surveyed, beating out ABC, CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, MSNBC, NBC and PBS. Thirty-four percent of respondents chose Fox News as the most trustworthy out of that list.
(via TPM LiveWire)
To the innumerate, the results seem contradictory. In fact, it is only what any reasonably intelligent person would expect.
The 34% of the population that chose Fox as the most trustworthy is the Republican base. One would expect each and every one of them to select the network that tells them what they want to hear. The rational among us split our votes amongst a host of contenders, with, I would hazard to guess, many pulling a response more or less at random out of their nether regions. Indeed, one would expect that as the level of Fox distrust grows among the nation as a whole, the degree to which the true believers harden their position will increase. The questions, as posed, do not measure the same thing, and to the extent the article implies there is a contradiction, it does the casual reader a disservice.
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