Univ Of Md: Fox News Viewers More Misinformed

A University of Maryland study (PDF) published earlier this month found that people in the survey who had the most exposure to Fox News were more likely to believe falsehoods and rumors about national and world affairs when compared to those who paid attention to other news outlets.

I’m avoiding the temptation to quote the entire article, but here are some highlights. Fox News has been criticized for

  • high profile donations to Republicans
  • deceptive video editing on multiple programs
  • on-air GOP fundraisers.

Leaked emails from Fox News have revealed that

  • top editors ordered anchors to use terminology favored by conservatives.
  • managing editor Bill Sammon, ordering staff to cast doubt upon climate data, even when it was not in question

Here is a sample of misinformation that Fox News viewers were found to believe:

  • 91 percent believed the stimulus legislation lost jobs
  • 72 percent believed the health reform law will increase the deficit
  • 72 percent believed the economy is getting worse
  • 60 percent believed climate change is not occurring
  • 49 percent believed income taxes have gone up
  • 63 percent believed the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts
  • 56 percent believed Obama initiated the GM/Chrysler bailout
  • 38 percent believed that most Republicans opposed TARP
  • 63 percent believed Obama was not born in the U.S. (or that it is unclear).

Full Article

NE – Nice Editor

There are a myriad of command shell based text editors for Unix operating systems. They were conceived by hard core geeks doing serious application development. This doesn’t quite fit the needs of a contemporary Linux desktop user or even a Mac user who just needs to do some simple editing of system files.

NE – short for “nice editor” is made for the humble desktop user. It is what you would get if you made notepad run on Linux, run in the command shell and if you added a few more features.

It uses CUA ( Windows/DOS ) keyboard shortcuts AND has menus, drop down menus. The commands are labeled what you would expect them to be labeled. It is small, takes little space on your hard drive, is very fast and runs on just about every kind of Unix, including Cygwin:

My first shovel

I did my personal part to ward off another snowmaggedon in Washington D.C.. I bought my first snow shovel.

Last year I couldn’t buy one or anything related to it. The stores in my area were cleaned out. For months.

Well, this year I decided to shop for my shovel and ice melt early and I noticed a few positive things along the way. The first is that I stopped at a CVS along the way and noticed they now sell kitchen trash bags made out of 65% recycled plastic. A big box store I stopped at also sells pet safe and plant safe ice melt. What a better world I live in when a big box store thinks its customers would be willing to pay slightly more for an environmentally friendly alternative to rock salt and a CVS knows that recycled trash bags will sell.

The woman at the hardware store where I ended up buying my shovel told me that there were a number of different environmentally friendly alternatives to rock salt. I ended up buying a shovel with a plastic head. The woman at the hardware store told me that such shovels actually hold up better under the weight of wet snow than aluminum. I didn’t like the idea of plastic, but I am not likely to throw out a snow shovel unless it breaks. I will likely have the shovel for the rest of my life. Aluminum requires a [b]lot[/b] of electricity to make so maybe the plastic shovel is also the greener choice in that regard.

Anyway, I like running into cool unexpected things like environmentally friendlier ice melt and trash bags made out of recycled plastic.