David Frum: Fox News Creates Alternative (False) News

Raw Story By David Edwards

Conservative columnist David Frum, who was speechwriter for former President George W. Bush, blasted Fox News on Sunday for creating an “alternative knowledge system.”

In an article published by New York Magazine in late November, Frum had argued that conservative media like Fox News and talk radio “immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.”

Watch this video from CNN’s Reliable Sources,
broadcast Dec. 11, 2011.

In an appearance on CNN Sunday, Frum cited claims made on Fox News that President Barack Obama was proposing a “new Christmas tree tax,” something that was found by both The Florida Times-Union and PolitiFact Oregon to be not true.

“It fed into a story about this Muslim-y kind of president trying to destroy a Christian holiday,” Frum explained to CNN’s Howard Kurtz. “To make this a ground for a cultural conflict, to create a sense in large numbers of people they are being persecuted and attacked at a time when the country is in so much trouble, that’s how this thing is fed.”

“The question is what is the impact on the viewer?” he continued. “And we know, for example, that people that watch a lot of Fox come away knowing a lot less about important world events. That’s a correlation that we know.”

Recent polling appears to back up Frum’s assertion.

Fairleigh Dickinson University found last month that “some outlets, especially Fox News, lead people to be even less informed than those who say they don’t watch any news at all.”

“For example, people who watch Fox News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors),” they wrote. “Fox News watchers are also 6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government than those who watch no news.”

New GOP Data Shows No Need For Strict Voter Photo ID

The Repub­li­can National Lawyers Asso­ci­a­tion (RNLA) in an attempt to dis­credit a NAACP report this week on the lack of voter fraud evi­dence has bol­stered the view that there is no need for voter ID laws, imposed by many states. The RNLA pro­duced data show­ing 46 states and var­i­ous con­vic­tions for voter fraud. Pre­sum­ably by their absence, 4 states and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia had no convictions.

View­ing the data for the period 2000–2010, the report by its own account shows there is no link between voter fraud in states and the need for stricter voter ID laws. The data shows that dur­ing the entire 10 year period, 21 states had only 1 or 2 con­vic­tions for some form of voter irreg­u­lar­ity. And some of these 21 states have the strictest form of voter ID laws based on a find­ing of 2 or less con­vic­tions in ten years. Five states had a total of three con­vic­tions over a ten year period. Rhode Island had 4 con­vic­tions for the same 10 years. Tak­ing a close look at the RNLA data shows 30 states, includ­ing the Dis­trict of Colum­bia had 3 or less voter fraud con­vic­tions for a 10 year period.

Voter ID laws enacted now in over half the states, require vot­ers to present some form of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion as a require­ment to vote. Four­teen states require a gov­ern­ment issued photo ID when vot­ing in per­son. At the time of reg­is­ter­ing to vote, other states like Kansas and Alabama fur­ther demand proof of cit­i­zen­ship beyond the fed­eral legal require­ment that cit­i­zens swear they are cit­i­zens. Kansas had one con­vic­tion for voter fraud in ten years; Alabama had three con­vic­tions in the same time period. Dur­ing the 2011 leg­isla­tive ses­sion, five states — Wis­con­sin, Texas, Ten­nessee, Alabama and South Car­olina — joined Geor­gia and Indi­ana by enact­ing the strictest form of photo ID require­ment for vot­ers, and most of these newest changes will first come into effect for the 2012 elections.

The RNLA says the voter ID laws are needed to pre­vent against dou­ble vot­ing, non-citizen vot­ing, fic­ti­tious voter reg­is­tra­tion and voter imper­son­ation. To hear Repub­li­cans tell the tale, one would think there has been mas­sive voter/election fraud neces­si­tat­ing the need for stricter voter ID laws across the coun­try. Now the Repub­li­cans’ own data dis­pels their ram­pant voter fraud myth. A closer scrutiny of the RNLA data shows voter fraud has no cor­re­la­tion to need­ing strict voter ID laws.

Full Arti­cle: OpE­d­News – Arti­cle: New GOP Data Shows No Need For Voter ID.

Twitter and the Campaign

The political conversation on Twitter is markedly different than that on blogs -- and both are decidedly different than the political narrative presented by the mainstream press, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism that analyzed more than 20 million tweets, the online conversation and traditional news coverage about the campaign from May 2 through November 27.

The study finds that campaign discourse on Twitter tended to be more opinionated and often more negative about candidates than on blogs and in the news. The Twitter conversation about a candidate was also more likely to change from week to week than on blogs.

The study also updates the tone and amount of attention to each candidate in news coverage overall, in an elite sub-sample of national news outlets, and in the political blogosphere. The work is part of a new ongoing analysis of the race for president conducted by PEJ that will continue through the election, tracking the amount of attention paid to the candidates in different media platforms and the tone of that attention.

Read the full report for more details on these subjects:

• The Campaign Conversation: Twitter vs. Blogs
• The Candidates on Twitter
• Update: The News Coverage Narrative
• An update on overall coverage of the candidates by news outlets and blogs
• Update: Candidate Blog Conversation
  

See also Pew's report on The Media Primary: How News Media and Blogs Have Eyed the Presidential Contenders during the First Phase of the 2012 Race