It's the Income, not the News Source

[JohnStOnge]

As I said I would in another thread I did some analysis of the Education Level, Income Level, and Political Knowledge Level results of the Pew Research poll described at http://www.people-press.org/2012/09/27/ ... audiences/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. The results were so interesting, to me at least, that I decided to start another thread. I'll try to be RELATIVELY short to start so there's a lot of stuff I won't say.

Most interesting is that Education Level doesn't matter once Income Level is taken into account. If you know the Income Level of an audience knowing the Education Level doesn't add anything to "predicting" Knowledge Level. The reverse is not true.

Another interesting thing is that when you adjust for Income Level the top four audiences in terms of Knowledge Level are:

Hardball
Rachael Maddow
Hannity
O'Reily Factor

Now, obviously, if you watch any of those shows you are not getting straight and unbiased news. You are getting opinion and spin. Think about that when you're tempted to think that how a News Source's audience scores on a knowledge test tells you something about how "accurate" and "unbiased" that news source is. And the Rachael Maddow show scored #1 in Knowledge Level the raw unadjusted rankings.

Ok this will make the post technically longer but below are the Knowledge Level rankings adjusted for where Sources fell in the Income Level rankings. The idea is that most of the variation in Knowledge Level is due to higher income people being more knowledgeable and this is what it would look like if all of the audiences or readerships were characterized by the same income distribution:

1. Hardball
2. Rachel Maddow
3. O'Reilly Factor
4. Hannity
5. MSNBC
6. New Yorker
7. Wall St. Journal
8. Fox News
9. Daily Show
10. CNN
11. Colbert Report
12. Sunday Shows
13. Daily Newspaper
14. NPR
15. New York Times
16. Daytime Talk
17. Local TV News
18. Morning News
19. USA Today
20. Network Evening
21. Rush Limbaugh
22. Economist
23. News blogs
24. News Magazines

[JohnStOnge]

For full disclosure I'll give you another ranking where I tried to create actual measurements instead of just looking at rankings. It's not really possible because, while you can calculate the actual average Knowledge Level scores, you can't really calculate the years of education or average incomes. You have to kind of come up with something and I tried to be reasonable in doing that. Somewhat different but the basic situation with education not being a factor once you know income and opinion shows being at the top didn't change. Rankings below. In this one I'm including a score that shows the magnitude and direction for the difference between what each audience scored on average on the knowledge test in terms of correct answers and what one would expect them to score based on their average income. So like for instance you can see that NPR did better than Fox News in this one but not by that much (0.07 more "correct" answers on the test on average when adjusted for income). The Knowledge score is the average of how well each group did on four questions ranking from 0 correct to 4 correct. As an example of how it works one would expect an audience characterized by NPRs income distribution to have an average score of 2.69 correct answers and the actual average is 2.73. Thus a 0.04 "overachievement" in the list below.

1 Hardball 0.42
2 Rachel Maddow 0.39
3 Hannity 0.26
4 Colbert Report 0.18
5 O'Reilly Factor 0.15
6 Sunday Shows 0.07
7 MSNBC 0.05
8 Daily Show 0.04
9. NPR 0.04
10. Wall St. Journal 0.04
11. Rush Limbaugh 0.00
12. New York Times -0.02
13. Fox News -0.03
14. News blogs -0.03
15. USA Today -0.05
16. New Yorker -0.05
17. Network Evening -0.09
18. Daytime Talk -0.10
19. Daily Newspaper -0.11
20. News Magazines -0.17
21. CNN -0.18
22. Local TV News -0.23
23. Morning News -0.26
24. Economist -0.32