As The Free Press recently pointed out, two Democratic lawmakers are pressuring cable and streaming services to drop Fox News and other conservative news media.
In a letter to the heads of those companies, U.S. Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, both from California, argue that Fox, Newsmax, and One America News Network have corrupted the nation’s public discourse with “misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies.”
Better for all, they hinted, that they be dropped and we get our news from trustworthy truth-tellers like CNN and MSNBC.
Well, if Eshoo, McNerney and other liberals are sincere about disrupting the flow of bogus information, they should aim their keyboards to the left.
A new study by the Skeptics Society, led by longtime science professor and Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer, notes that liberals have been woefully bamboozled by the mainstream media’s narrative on arguably the most consequential issue facing America at the moment.
Racism.
More specifically, racism by the enforcers of the white supremacist patriarchy, police officers.
The Society, as part of its ongoing “Civil Unrest and Presidential Election Study,” polled 980 adults, with a median age of 47 and 56 percent of whom were women.
The question they wanted to answer: How informed are Americas about race and policing?
To figure it out, they borked down the respondents into five groups: very liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, and very conservative.
They then asked two questions:
The first was: “If you had to guess, how many unarmed Black men were killed by police in 2019?” They gave respondents a range of between “about 10” to “more than 10,000.”
The second question was: “If you had to guess, in 2019 what percentage of people killed by police were Black?” They accepted any number from 0 to 100.
Using The Washington Post’s database of police shootings, which the Society noted was the “most complete” according to Nature magazine, the correct answer was 13.
But those answering the poll were wildly off target.
Conservatives were most on the mark.
Forty-six percent each of those who were “conservative” or “very conservative” replied “about 10.”
On the other hand, only 22 percent of those who were “liberal” answered likewise, as did just 16 percent of the “very liberal.”
The rest of those groups said 100 or way more.
Astonishingly, 53 percent of the “very liberal” group and 39 percent of those in the ”liberal” camp guesstimated the number at 1,000 or more. In one year.
As to the second question, the Post said the percentage of people killed by police in 2019 who were black was 24.9.
Conservatives again were closest, answering 37.8 percent, while moderates and the “very conservative” both sad about 45 percent.
The “liberal” group pegged the rate at 56.2 percent, and the “very liberal” said 60.4 percent.
In assessing this, the Skeptics Society noted, “Our overall findings indicate that people are uninformed regarding the available data on fatal police shootings in the U.S.”
“Specifically, we found that the more people reported being ‘liberal’ or ‘very liberal’ … the greater the discrepancy between the available data and their estimations.”
That’s putting it kindly.
The Skeptics did not speculate why the results varied so widely. They actually petitioned readers to offer suggestions.
But clearly one answer is media consumption.
Those on the left eschew and demean or ridicule Fox and other conservative media and their consumers, and yet they are the ones who are most woefully misinformed about what the Skeptics called “the defining issue of 2020.”
And what’s worse is that the most ignorant among us on this issue demand that we remake every aspect of American society based on their grossly mistaken worldview, as fed to them by media that refuse to see or report the truth.