Viewers of Fox News viewers are less informed overall than people who don’t watch any news, says a new poll from Farleigh Dickinson University.

Researchers asked New Jersey residents about the uprisings in Egypt and the Middle East and correlated their responses with their news sources. “People who watch Fox News are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government” and “6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government” compared to those who watch no news at all, the researchers concluded.

Overall, 53% of all respondents knew that Egyptians successfully overthrew Hosni Mubarak and 48% knew that Syrians have yet to overthrow their government.

The study controlled for demographic factors such as education and partisanship to ensure the results were not driven by those factors. “Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all,” concluded Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Farleigh Dickinson.

Last year, a study from the University of Maryland reached a similar conclusion. It looked into whether Fox News viewers were more likely to be misinformed about news events and found that they were. 

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