Last updated on April 9th, 2018 at 09:32 am
PunditFact tallied up all of the statements that they evaluated from the three cable news networks and found that 60% of all the statements they examined from Fox News were mostly false or worse.
According to PunditFact, here is how the three cable networks did on statements that the fact checker examined:
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At Fox and Fox News, 10 percent of the claims PunditFact has rated have been True, 11 percent Mostly True, 18 percent Half True, 21 percent Mostly False, 31 percent False and nine percent Pants on Fire.
That means about 60 percent of the claims checked have been rated Mostly False or worse.
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At MSNBC and NBC, 44 percent of claims have received a rating of Mostly False or worse.
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And as for CNN? It has the best record among the cable networks, as 80 percent of of the claims rated are Half True or better.
PuditFact doesn’t check every statement made on the cable networks, so they strongly caution against drawing broad conclusions from their tallies, but this one of those situations where if there’s fire. Fox News has never made factual reporting a basis for what they do, and I can hear readers saying to themselves, “Just 60% false, that seems kind of low to me,” but the PunditFact findings match up with other studies that have concluded that Fox News viewers are the least informed of all media consumers.
MSNBC has become more of an opinion based network, so it isn’t surprising that they would be second behind Fox News in terms of true statements. CNN is the only widely accessible cable network, Al Jazeera America is not widely available, that does straight news, so it makes sense that they would have the lowest number of false statements. MSNBC is more factual than Fox News, but not as factual as CNN.
It is impossible to watch Fox News for an hour and not be subjected to a false or inaccurate statement. Fox News is one of the main reasons why the American people are so poorly informed. When the top cable news network is dedicated to pushing an ideological agenda over reporting the news, the public will be less informed. Even people who don’t watch Fox News are subjected to their misinformation techniques via interactions with poor informed Fox News watching friends and family.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
