Anthony DiMaggio: Mediated Ignorance

Why Jon Stewart and Politifact are Wrong About Public Misinformation

"Stewart is a liberal pundit operating in the mass media, and his program tends to privilege Democratic and mainstream liberal points of view, while skewering conservative ones.  As a result, his limited insights are unlikely to uncover the larger problem in the American political-media system.  This larger problem, simply stated, is the consistent correlation between political attentiveness and media consumption across all media outlets, and the corresponding increase in political misinformation resulting from this exposure. ...

Of course Fox viewers display a staggering ignorance; but at the end of the day, that ignorance is not substantively different from that seen among most media consumers."

http://www.counterpunch.org/dimaggio06242011.html