Perhaps Fox News Channel viewers are taking the network’s motto, “We report, you decide,” a bit too seriously. More so than viewers of any other network, those who get their news from FNC are deciding wrong, believing untrue things about the war in Iraq.
   Almost half think that Iraq and Al Qaeda have been linked, a quarter think that world opinion favored the war, and 23 percent think that weapons of mass destruction have been uncovered, according to a new study. None of those statements about the war is true.
    While you can’t exactly blame Fox News for its viewers’ beliefs, you probably can blame the network for not presenting a more accurate picture of the war. 
  “It seems possible that Fox watchers tend to create more illusions and misperceptions. Or maybe they have more illusions, so that’s why they’re watching Fox more,” says Steven Kull, director of the University of Maryland and Knowledge Networks' Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the study.  “Maybe they emphasize the good news more.”
   Fox was hardly the only network with misinformed viewers, though it had by far the largest percentage. 
   Eighty percent of FNC viewers have at least one of those three incorrect views, compared to 71 percent of CBS’s, 61 percent of ABC’s and 55 percent of NBC’s and CNN’s.
   Those who rely mostly on print media had a slightly lower incidence of such views, 47 percent, while PBS and National Public Radio devotees boasted the lowest incidence at 23 percent apiece.
   “I guess what I found most surprising was the finding that in some cases the people who pay more attention to the news, their misperceptions increase rather than decrease,” Kull says. “That’s true not only in the case of Fox, although they had a significant level that stood out.”
   In fact, PIPA found that 60 percent of all respondents believed at least one of the false statements presented.
   The study also found that respondents were less likely to have false beliefs if they were against the war, perhaps because they were more inclined to disregard representations of the war's progress by the Bush Administration.
   Among supporters of the war, only 23 percent of respondents were found to have no misperceptions. Of those who had two misperceptions, 78 percent supported the war; that rose to 86 percent when three misperceptions were present.
   By contrast, a viewer's political allegiance, Democratic or Republican, appears to have less bearing than the network the viewer watches.
   “A Democrat who watches Fox News is going to have more misperceptions than a Democrat who watches PBS,” Kull says. “A Republican who watches Fox News is going to have more misperceptions than a Republican watching PBS.
   “Even when you control for these attitudinal biases, you can still see the effects of the network. That strongly suggests there’s something in the stimuli producing that, although it doesn’t prove it.”