Fox News Best at Dumbing Down America

Results of a preliminary study conducted by the Institute for the Dumbing Down of America (IDDA), Fox News Group has come out way ahead of any other television network news provider as having phenomenal success in creating misinformed, less intelligent human beings over the past ten years.

According to Dr. Bo Gusfindings, “folks who have been getting their news from shows such as The Glenn Beck Show (while no longer airing on Fox, people still believe Glenn Beck to be the #1 guy to go to for news), The O’Reilly Factor, On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, and Hannity were less able to correctly answer simple third grade questions than those who got their news from alternative news sources.

One study participant, when asked if she thought global warming was a real threat stated robotically, “global warming is the biggest scam perpetuated on people.” (Points were deducted from her score for using perpetuated rather than perpetrated.) But moving on, this particular Fox News viewer then gave her reasons for why she thought global warming was a scam:

1. Right now it is so cold where I live that I can’t even go outside, and I live in Houston. Can you believe it snowed in Houston? In the winter? If snow is cold, it can’t be warm, right?

2. They say the ice at both poles is melting and making the oceans rise, but the oceans rise and fall all the time. It’s called tides.

3. Global warming people just want me to buy green products, but my favorite color is blue.

When Gusfindings was pressed as to why he thought adults who watched Fox News were becoming less intelligent, he cited several factors. “For one thing,” he said, “these viewers are being shown misinformation in the form of photos and stage props, such as blackboards and white boards, while simultaneously being told half truths and misinformation. What this does is confuse the Fox News viewer, who has to decide whether to listen to what is being told him or watch the visual aids. This type of news broadcast leads to a repressed thinking pattern caused by willing the viewer to do two things at one time.

For instance, on The Glenn Beck Show, Beck used many visual aids to get his point across such as white boards, black boards, and giant note pads on easels. In one case, while misspelling the word “Oligarhy” on a blackboard, Beck was telling his viewing audience that America was turning into an “Oligarchy” and tying it in visually with words like ACORN Style Organization, Obama and Hidden Agenda, among others. Said Gusfindings, “this is a perfect example from which to gather our information for our studies.”

After showing this particular video to the study participants, Gusfindings gave each of them a simple comprehension test to determine what they learned, and these are the results:

1. How do you spell Oligarchy? 100% answered “Oligarhy.”

2. What is a hidden agenda? 95% answered “true” that it was a practical joke played on the President by his children.

3. What is ACORN? Answers ranged from “I don’t know” to “why do they spell it with all capital letters?”

4. Who is Obama? 97% of the answers cannot be printed here, but suffice it to say that only the “N” word was spelled correctly.

In addition, Beck staged skits featuring things like dousing an actor on his show with supposed gasoline while impersonating scary things Obama might say, and then threatening to light a match to set the actor on fire. This type of subliminal thought transference leaves the viewer coming away from the images believing Obama to be a very scary and psychopathic leader who looks a lot like a white guy.

Gusfindings was asked what, if anything, can be done to reverse this unsettling trend of dumbing down America by these types of faux news channels. He had this to say, “short of tying these folks down and making them watch real news reports where a newscaster actually reports the news without injecting his or her two cents’ worth into the stories presented, and short of taking away viewers’ television sets altogether and making them actually sit down and read a newspaper, I’m afraid this trend will continue to escalate until the majority of Americans will only be able to communicate in bits and bites, and by bites, I do mean that literally.”