Sublime Bloviations: Is Chris Mooney correct about Jon Stewart and the PolitiFact squabble?

The other day I updated my assessment of the Stewart-PolitiFact brouhaha by evaluating the three additional survey sets mentioned in a Chris Mooney post from a few weeks back.

I credited Mooney with appropriate caution in that case. But apparently I credited him a bit too much. Mooney has since weighed in to defend Stewart:

(I)n an environment in which conservatives are more inaccurate and more misinformed about science and basic policy facts, the “fact checkers” nevertheless feel unduly compelled to correct “liberal” errors too—which is fine, as long as they are really errors.

But sometimes they aren’t. A case in point is Politifact’s recent and deeply misguided attempt to correct Jon Stewart on the topic of…misinformation and Fox News.

This must mean that Mooney thinks he has evidence that conservatives as a group are more inaccurate and more misinformed about science and basic policy facts. I had earlier misinterpreted Mooney by thinking he had stopped short of that dubious conclusion.

Straight on to the evidence:

My research, and my recent post, most emphatically supports this statement. Indeed, I cited five (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) separate public opinion studies in support of it—although I carefully noted that these studies do not prove causation (e.g., that watching Fox News causes one to be more misinformed). The causal arrow could very well run the other way—believing wrong things could make one more likely to watch Fox News in the first place.

Mooney apparently thinks he has a middle ground between that staked out by PolitiFact (misinformed=uninformed) and that cultivated by Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake (misinformation=>misinformed). I've read descriptions along the lines of "misinformed is believing you know something when you don't," which is distinguished from simply not knowing. Mooney tried to narrow the meaning of Stewart's statement to apply to "science and basic policy facts" rather than to things like which party controls Congress. I'm not sure Mooney's case is justifiable, but I don't expect the attempted distinction to matter in the end.

Mooney:

Politifact wasn’t even aware of the studies I’ve cited. Instead, the site’s attempt to debunk Stewart largely relied on misunderstanding what he meant.

PolitiFact cited two from Mooney's initial list of five (the two PIPA surveys). I'm not sure how Mooney missed that. Perhaps he accidentally omitted a word or two (Mooney later notes that PolitiFact used the PIPA studies). As I pointed out, the remaining three studies share the same problems that make the PIPA studies unsatisfactory. Selection bias in determining what information to test infects all five. To test the general level of political policy and/or scientific information one needs a test designed for that purpose. Each of Mooney's citations manifests a narrow focus. Each of the studies features ambiguous statements of fact, which will tend to skew the answers and, as a result, the conclusions.

Mooney:

What Stewart obviously meant—and what I mean—is that when it comes to politicized, contested issues where the facts have been made murky due to political biases, it is Fox viewers who are the most likely to believe incorrect things—to fall prey to misinformation. A quintessential example of such an issue is global warming, or whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction or was collaborating with Al Qaeda. There are many, many others.

I suspect that the segue from "politicized, contested issues where the facts have been made murky" to "most likely to believe incorrect things" is not as clean as Mooney appears to suggest. The WMD issue serves as a case in point. It is absolutely undeniable that Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Possessing them was one of the prerequisites for the ceasefire condition requiring their destruction.

What? Mooney is talking about immediately prior to the invasion? Even then, Iraq unquestionably possessed weapons of mass destruction, albeit old, small in number and of very questionable effectiveness.

It is exactly that type of ambiguity that renders the PIPA studies and their like relatively worthless as a measure of individual and group misinformation. Notably, that type of ambiguity tends to occur precisely when the author thinks it is obvious what is meant because of their own ideological predisposition. A liberal like Mooney will automatically assume that it refers to large stockpiles of ready-to-go WMD. A conservative, maybe not so much. Therefore the conservative is misinformed?

Mooney also skimps on the fact that large differences occur regarding beliefs in various supposed facts. For example, his citation of the Kaiser Family Foundation study examining beliefs about the health care reform legislation found that Republicans were more likely than Democrats to possess an awareness of the individual mandate feature (73 percent to 63 percent). The questions asked and the phraseology used make all the difference.

Mooney:

It is of course around contested political facts, and contested scientific facts, where we find active, politically impelled, and emotionally laden misinformation campaigns—and it is in the latter realm that Fox News viewers are clearly more misinformed. Once again, I’ve cited 5 studies to this effect—concerning the Iraq war, the 2010 election, global warming, health care reform, and the Ground Zero Mosque. By contrast, Politifact only cites two of these studies, and attempts to critique one of them (the 2010 election study)—misguidedly to my mind, but who really even cares. It is obvious where the weight of the evidence lies at this point, unless further, relevant studies are brought to bear.

With all due respect to Mooney, the "weight of the evidence" is a vapor.

Is it possible that Fox News viewers as a group are misinformed in the category Mooney names? Sure, it's possible. And PolitiFact won't get to the bottom of it without finding a new and groundbreaking study. PolitiFact uses a fallacious "burden of proof" criterion and may justify rating Stewart "False" according to that standard. But on the full set of facts as we have them, Stewart is just wrong. There are no studies that scientifically support the conclusion he's peddling. Mooney shares the error.

Afters:

Mooney updated his post with a reference to another study supposedly supporting Stewart: