James Fallows

They are the ones presented this morning by John Sides, drawing on Pew analyses of positive, negative, and neutral press coverage of all Republican candidates and of President Obama through this past year.

Here's the trend in coverage of Mitt Romney. The solid line means "positive" stories (in Romney's case, about his business record or primary-election successes); the dotted line means "negative" stories (for Romney, about Bain-related layoffs or campaign-trail gaffes); and "neutral" stories are left out.



Main theme: Romney endured slightly-to-somewhat more negative-than-positive coverage in much of 2011, during the intense primary debates and negative ads, but has had much more positive-than-negative coverage through this year.

Now, here is comparable coverage of President Obama:


Main point: President Obama has always had more negative-than-positive coverage through the past year.

Here is how the two charts look when combined:

You may have already seen this a million times, but I've been on the road so it's new to me.

First, the famous "The Bear" ad from the Reagan re-election campaign in 1984. It's not so easy to find embeddable versions of this one, thus the somewhat odd spacing below. In its mere 30 seconds, the ad packed in a lot of the powerful political imagery of that era, much of which has endured. Please do watch it, even if you were of age to have seen and remembered it at the time.
 

Now, with that in mind as source and benchmark, please check out the recent homage version, "The Pig."



This one probably won't show up in a national ad buy, unlike The Bear, but just as a matter of craftsmanship, and as a sign of the durable effect of the original ad, it's worth noticing. Thanks to reader J.A. 

Just off the long-haul Shanghai-Newark-DC National route and stumbling into our house. For another time, perhaps even tomorrow: why Newark has become my new favorite airport for trips into and out of China, apart from the Cory Booker factor and the welcome fact that it's not Dulles.

In this original item on the significance of China's "slow" internet, based on this NYT essay drawn from this book, I argued that the speed of internet access in China, relative to the super-quick networks in Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, was a useful proxy for China's openness and modernization overall. It has some modest direct effect on China's ability to nurture first-rate world research centers, and it is more important as a marker of the ongoing tensions between the security-state and the entrepreneurial forces in China's leadership.

Then in this reply, a number of Chinese and Western tech officials said that the subtler and more intriguing aspect was the difference between (very high) communication speeds inside the Chinese "Great Firewall" and (often very slow) speeds across the Firewall, to sites in the outside world. As one tech official in China wrote:

The big question is not whether or not China can build a world-class society while fighting the internet, the question is whether or not it can do so while building a giant intranet that is China-specific. China is big enough that I think this is something of an open question.

I am going to double-down and say: if, in the long run, internet users in China suffer penalties reaching sites outside the country, then no matter how big and important the Chinese web-o-sphere becomes, it will not be "world-leading" or "world-class," because much of the world will be walled off. To be clear, I hope for China's continuing more complete integration with the rest of the world. That would make some Chinese firms more profoundly "competitive" to Western incumbents -- Apple, Google, GE -- than they are now, but it would also suggest that the "Chinese system" as a whole, and most Chinese people, would more easily interact with the rest of the world.

Now, several further installments on the longer-term significance of this proxy for Chinese openness.
1) From a Chinese-American reader:

I was from China.  I came to US to pursue graduate study and have since settled here.  I am working and raising family in Northeast.

It seems to me indeed Internet speed in terms of accessing servers outside China may not be much of an issue for the first wave of outsourcing (the manufacture outsourcing) which has been going on for the last 15-20 years.  After all what matters at the end of the day is the speed to transport 'goods' across pacific (US centric view (:-)).  

However, perhaps we are now witnessing the second wave of outsourcing (office work, research and development) where the product is no longer goods, rather it's data and information.  Computer systems and applications are integral part of this type of work.   Internet speed in terms of accessing servers outside China will likely matter.

2) From the CTO of a Western tech firm that is expanding operations in China (emphasis added):

Our company runs a service with [several tens of millions of ] subscribers out of California and recently launched a China-only version of our service out of data centers there. We are adding around [tens of thousands] of new Chinese users per day....

The firewall issues going in and out of China get a lot of attention, but the state of networking within China is a bit hairy as well.

There are a small handful of network carriers in China, all with state-backed status (e.g. China Unicom, China Telecom, etc.).

In spite of the state backing, these carriers frequently refuse to carry network traffic from each other. I've even heard unverifiable stories from Chinese Internet professionals of these carriers cutting each others cables when they encroach on each others' turf. [JF note: this resembles some of the stories I've told about trying to create a truly nationwide air-travel network.]

This means that any Internet service in China needs to connect individually to each of these network carriers. You can't just connect to 2 or 3 high-quality carriers and expect them to route traffic properly to the others like you do in the West. Instead, each service needs to deal with direct connectivity to each provider.

The top Internet Data Centers (IDCs) provide some aggregation and intermediation services that allow you to pay them to connect your service to all of the networks, but this costs about 10x as much as comparable Internet connectivity in the US.

In addition, network performance within the country varies widely by geographic locale. East-west networking tends to be much better than north-south. Our users in Guangzhou say they get better performance to [our site in the US] than they do to our servers in Beijing.

All of this translates into some significant inefficiencies for Chinese Internet companies that their western counterparts don't have to bear, independent of The Firewall. I.e. paying 10x as much for unreliable bandwidth as well as higher network engineering labor strikes me as the sort of problem that may eventually result in some market pressure from businesses on the government to provide some level of deregulation of internal network telecommunications.

I.e. it's as if factories in China had to pay 10x as much for unreliable state-run electricity compared to competitors in Mexico or Thailand.

3) From a Western academic with extensive experience inside China and with the Chinese language:

Having [recently] suffered through a year of living and teaching in China,  it is all too painfully obvious to me that the internet controls are harmful to the Chinese people.  My own students often complain, and they do everything they can to circumvent the controls and restrictions, but with only partial success.

I would estimate that well over half of the capability of the internet is unavailable to the Chinese people.  Surely that has a negative effect on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the PRC.

4) And from another person familiar with the Chinese tech world:

I agree, throttling (or mismanaged setups of DNS that unnecessarily limits speeds)  is certainly an issue for power users who depend on hi-quality, consistent internet speeds. And combined with the censorship in China, it's just another reason for outside firms to not even bother trying to crack the Chinese market or to invest it in. It's certainly a boon to local firms since.. there is no net neutrality in China and firms with guanxi or money might be able to purchase better internet speeds.

The big picture, once again, is that so much is happening so fast in China, and we're all trying to make sense of where it might lead. More -- and on a variety of backed-up topics -- after a bout of Eastern Daylight Time zone sleep.

Previously in the "Ask Dr. Popkin" series, see this entry with links to previous rounds. The big idea here is that political scientist Samuel Popkin, of UCSD and the recent book The Candidate, is applying his studies of how presidents run for re-election to this year's race.

Question:
"So, Dr. Popkin, tell us what 'the Bain question' shows about the approach each campaign is taking to this campaign. Has Barack Obama been shrewd, or foolish and (gasp) 'divisive,' in saying that Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital is a minus rather than a plus in his suitability to the economic problems of 2012. Is the Romney campaign doing the right thing in basing its appeal on his record as a 'job-creator,' in this time of chronic unemployment?"

Answer:
"Dear Jim:

"Mitt Romney has trumpeted his success as a can-do, growth- and job-creating executive.    He has relied on the argument that he can make the economy grow because he has a track record at making individual companies more profitable.  

"Appealing as this argument may be, it is, at best, a leap of faith.  For Obama to win this election, he must get voters to look before they leap, and persuade them that the methods Bain used to enrich its investors will not grow industries, let alone an entire national economy.

"It's already begun.  As Romney continues his party-unification tour around the country, Obama has launched attack ads on Bain.  Obama's campaign can't afford to let Romney define himself without getting their side of his story out.  Behind all the furor over Obama's anti-Bain ads is the beginning of a long set of opposing arguments about government and the economy.  The discussions about Romney's personality are a sideshow to fill time for pollsters and pundits.

"The Obama campaign's ads are not attacking Romney's brains, wealth or success.  Unlike the allegations that John Kerry did not deserve his silver star or that George W Bush used family connections to avoid military service, none of the ads are denying Romney's accomplishments. 

"Instead they are questioning the applicability and desirability of his methods for governing an entire country. The Obama campaign scores only if it persuades people that what was good for Bain won't work for America.  

"Obama's actual statements about Romney's time at Bain have been carefully phrased to argue that private equity is 'a healthy part of the economy,' but that being good at 'buying and selling companies' or maximizing profits for investors leaves Romney 'with little understanding of the job that a president needs to do.'  Romney's working assumption, Obama says in his speeches, is: 'if CEOs and wealthy investors like [Romney] get rich, then the rest of us automatically will too.'  (Obama and his fellow Democrats have their own Wall Street donors to keep happy, but I don't think you can challenge the credentials of a private equity star without pointing out the dark side of corporate restructuring by private equity investors and ruffling a few feathers.)

"So far, what the Obama campaign has given us is just a minor rehash of some old story lines used against Mitt in his failed 1994 Senate run against Ted Kennedy, and then elaborated by Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry in the Republican primaries.

"If he ends up simply attacking Romney for union busting, job cutting or 'vulture capitalism,' Obama loses.  He only wins if he can persuade people that growing the whole economy requires a policy approach that Romney has already opposed, doesn't appreciate or will not enact.  Without that, what evidence is there that a venture capitalist cannot simply apply his skills to growing the entire economy as America's CEO?

"Mitt's campaign has had an easy time defending against the Bain ads by recycling comments from high-profile Democrats (Newark Mayor Cory Booker and former Obama 'car czar' Steve Rattner) who criticized the ads and defended private equity - as if the issue raised by Obama was whether private equity firms ought to be allowed to exist.  So far, Romney hasn't needed to go beyond the obvious point - that he knows more about business than a law professor and community organizer - to explain what specific policies he will propose.

"Republican strategists know the policy questions are inevitable, though, and are worried enough to publicly call on Romney to fill in the blanks.  If Obama is the problem, why is Romney the solution?  As Mark McKinnon put it: 'He has to show that he has a vision of a better way. He can't just say "The future is bleak, follow me." '

"Obama will certainly try to move the debate to a discussion about the proper role of government in improving the performance of the entire economy. A CEO isn't responsible for helping laid off workers find new work  or taking care of them until they get another job; a president is. A CEO isn't responsible for educating their employees' children for  new jobs in other industries; a president is.  

"The president has some powerful cards to play.

"In November 2008, Romney came out 100% opposed to a federal bailout of the auto industry.  His NY Times op-ed began, 'If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.'  Economists can argue about whether the auto bailout created new jobs or saved old jobs, but the companies are still here (and GM posted a $1 billion profit in the first fiscal quarter of 2012). Obama can claim that Romney was wrong when he applied his Bain experience to an entire industry.  

"In 2009, Romney ballyhooed his healthcare success in Massachusetts as a conservative, cost-cutting model for the country.  Now he has to explain why an effective, visionary CEO would repeal the plan he created just three years ago.  Is reversing his stance evidence that he was the CEO of a Titanic-sized mistake?  A person without core convictions who bends with the prevailing winds?  Or someone who has seen the error of his ways and is the wiser for it?  
Of course, the Affordable Care Act scares millions of voters who fear government mandates, and Congressional Republicans have said they will keep the protection for people with preexisting conditions when they repeal the mandate.  I doubt it is possible to insure people with preexisting conditions without the mandate.  But it is very hard to explain these inter-connections within the healthcare package.  Once it passed through Congress, the Obama campaign stopped trying to explain Obamacare to a still-confused public.  Unless they do a better job of explaining the specifics, Romney might very well be able to finesse the healthcare reform debate.

"We will be revisiting this debate about the government and the economy all election.  Obama and Romney are both immensely talented - and both have major credibility problems.  Obama has presided over mounting debt and a sluggish economy; it is hard for him to blame an obstructionist GOP congress without looking impotent.  Romney has not overcome suspicions about his wealth and privilege and   convinced people that he has a positive - and credible --  vision for a better America."

That's the news for now; stay tuned for more.

Over the weekend the International Herald Tribune ran a version of an opinion piece I'd had in the NYT Sunday Review section, itself a version on an argument in my book, about the next stage in China's development. Its main point was to ask whether the strategy behind the huge Chinese achievement of the past thirty years -- that of alleviating poverty on a wide scale through an emphasis on construction, infrastructure, and low-wage manufacturing, was likely to be a help or a hindrance as Chinese companies tried to become high-wage, high-value, international brand competitors. How would we know whether the Chinese system was becoming capable of competing with Apple, rather than outsourcing for Apple.

[A view in Shanghai today, which is looking very nice.]



In my book I lay out a number of markers indicating whether Chinese companies and the Chinese productive system were moving in this higher-end direction. In the article I mentioned this one:

After another several-month stay in China last year, I came up with one proxy for China's ability to take this next step: how slow its Internet service is, compared with South Korea's or Japan's.

In much of America, the Internet is slow by those standards, but mainly for infrastructure reasons. In China it's slow because of political control: censorship and the "Great Firewall" bog down everything and make much of the online universe impossible to reach. "What country ever rode to pre-eminence by fighting the reigning technology of the time?" a friend asked while I was in China last year. "Did the Brits ban steam?"

Several people have objected and responded, with good points that make me clarify my own. For instance:

1) At his China Hearsay site, Stan Abrams asks where it is really fair to claim that China's growth is suffering to any serious degree because of Internet controls:

How much is China's GDP suffering because of lower Net speeds? Is that comment about the Brits banning steam fair?

First answer: I don't really know....

Second answer: I have a feeling that the conclusions on this issue are overstated to some degree....

My point is that it's too easy to say that China's Net speed is slow and therefore its economy is taking a significant hit.

Actually I agree. I'm not claiming that at this moment China's output sags to any real extent because of the delay in reaching firewalled sites outside of China. My point was that when looking for indicators of a general opening-up of the Chinese system -- of how the balance stands in the ongoing struggle between the security-state forces and the economic-development forces that is underway in so many parts of China's policy -- a reduction in the Great Firewall handicap would be an important sign.

2) A Western reader who lives in China and works in the Internet industry sends a long and very detailed reply. I quote it in full because it raises several different points about current levels of Chinese control and the reasoning behind them. Emphasis added, in this and the subsequent note:

You are correct that access from inside China to websites outside of China is slow, and this is because we have only a few entry/exit points for the intertubes in/out of China.

 I also spent a lot of time in the past on off-the-record analysis and scanning of the ISPs and bandwidth in China, and until 5-6 years ago, a large amount -- but not most -- of the speed issues in China were a result not of blocks, but rather of poorly-configured DNS, slowly updated DNS, and poorly-trained Chinese ISP technicians. I have given lectures in places like [..] to ISP chief admins on how best to configure and work with DNS and allow for faster speeds. China's Internet is held together by duct tape, as it is in the other parts of the world.

Another reason for speed/connection/interoperability/latency issues is very capitalistic in nature: business competition. Simply, there is no Net Neutrality in China. I can write books on this, so I'll leave it at that for now.

But inside China, the Internet is "fast enough" for what netizens do now. I can view Youku videos with no buffering while sitting on my toilet viewing my iPad connected to a wifi modem a few rooms away connected to a mediocre adsl connection to China Telecom in Beijing.

I also routinely hold GoToMeeting.com video and audio meetings with people from around the world with rare speed-related problems.

My wife routinely does Skype-based audio interviews with guests from around the world, again with rare speed-related problems. She also uploads data to her servers in the US, and also her videos to YouTube, all without major speed problems (the latter of course via a proxy).

Most importantly: Internet access in China is truly ubiquitous. In the calm of Jiuzhaigou's towering trees, my mobile phone signal is at full bars. At the top of a ski slope in Jinan, I can download my email. Driving my car from Beijing to Xi'an, I have uninterrupted streaming Internet music via my iPhone on long stretches of highway. I can walk into (most) elevators in China and continue talking on my phone without the signal dying. These things are rarely possible in America with its deadzones. 13-14 years ago I could easily go to the corner newspaper stand in Beijing and buy a card for dial-up Internet access, but when I visited the US I had to register with AOL and go through hoops to get online. Getting online in China has always been easier, albeit content more restricted, than the USA. It is still easier today in China to get online than in the US.

Of course the trade-off to having full bars at the top of a ski slope in Jinan is that I am now trackable on that ski slope in Jinan.

I do not mean to be an apologist (or marketer) for China's Internet. But for 99% of Chinese netizens, they can do without constant access to non-Chinese websites and services hosted offshore. So while I too often lament (bitterly and frustratingly) that the slow Internet is killing China's growth abilities, I also calm down and then realize that China's Internet bubble (sic) works for all the participants currently operating within that bubble. Complaining about slow access to sites in the West is mostly a Laowai Dilemma. I do feel your pain.

3) And similarly, from a western reader in Shanghai:

I think you are uncharacteristically missing something. The internet in China is way fast *as long as you stay in China*. China is not fighting "the reigning technology" at all; as  you know sites like TaoBao and Weibo, and now Weixin, are at least as significant as their counterparts in the US both technically and in their effect on society. It is easy for foreigners to assume that because they can't get on Facebook, or Twitter, or Youtube, or Hulu (oh wait, Hulu and Pandora are blocked *from the US* - separate rant) and that Google doesn't work half the time that Chinese can't use the internet, when nothing could be farther from the truth. Some Chinese certainly would love to get to those sites - but it's not clear that it's a significant number in the context of the Chinese internet.

The big question is not whether or not China can build a world-class society while fighting the internet, the question is whether or not it can do so while building a giant intranet that is China-specific. China is big enough that I think this is something of an open question.

Please don't get me wrong; I think the GFW is absurd and repugnant. And it is indeed hard to think that any nation that is scared of Facebook could be called great. But it's certainly misleading at best to say China is fighting the internet.

I'll just say: these are important points, and I agree. As I argued several years ago in my piece about the Great Firewall, the brilliance of China's internet control strategy is that it is not airtight. People who want to, badly enough, can find ways around the controls. But doing so can be costly, and is a nuisance -- and an increasing one, as the government more and more often interferes with "VPN" services that let you evade the firewall. It's a nuisance resident foreigners are willing to put up with -- but that the vast majority of Chinese internet users will not bother with, since so much is available to them so easily within the (monitored) Chinese-only internet world, in which you really can get coverage anywhere. (I've used a four-bar-coverage cell phone from deep down inside a Chinese coal mine.)

I agree with these points, and thank the readers for spelling them out -- while still maintaining that a variety of measures of fully international openness, like those I mentioned here, are significant in measuring China's progress toward fully featured, soft-power-plenipotentiary, rich-country status. As reader #3 says, "the question is whether or not China can build a world-class society while building a giant intranet that is China-specific." By my lights, the answer to that question must be No. Everything I have learned about the world tells me that "world-class" powers must be open to the world. I agree with the reader that China's scale makes it an open question -- and if the answer turns out to be Yes, many of our (my) other assumptions will come into question as well.

This is why the place is interesting. And to close out, the People's Square view just now, from ground level and above:

1) I have a piece in the NYT Sunday Review section today, on the question many Chinese economists and industrialists are asking themselves but that relatively few outsiders recognize. Essentially it is whether the Chinese system of "guided" capitalism, which has achieved such economic, technological, and social-welfare miracles in the past 30 years, will be an advantage or a handicap over the next few years -- as Chinese companies try to become more like the Apples, Samsungs, Daimlers, GEs, etc for which they now mainly do assembly work. Sample:

After another several-month stay in China last year, I came up with one proxy for China's ability to take this next step: how slow its Internet service is, compared with South Korea's or Japan's.

In much of America, the Internet is slow by those standards, but mainly for infrastructure reasons. In China it's slow because of political control: censorship and the "Great Firewall" bog down everything and make much of the online universe impossible to reach. "What country ever rode to pre-eminence by fighting the reigning technology of the time?" a friend asked while I was in China last year. "Did the Brits ban steam?"

Before you ask: Yes, this argument is not coincidentally related to the one I deal with in China Airborne.

2) My unvarying theme about China over the years has been its enormous variability and internal contrast. This is one reason why I've often wished that first-time visitors to China, or frequent short-time visitors, would somehow be prevented from taking direct flights to either Beijing or Shanghai. Instead it would be great if they had to start in Lanzhou or Changsha or Yinchuan or some other place whose ritzy downtown district is less easy to mistake for a big Western capital. That would give them a range of additional mental images to consider when they see the stories on China's latest gargantuan-scale achievement or its latest political intrigue and turmoil.

Here is a video that gets across the way things can look when you're not in the center of Shanghai or Beijing. It's from Sinostand, with references from Walter Russell Mead and Sam Roggeveen, and it shows the results of a week-long bicycle trip through Shandong province. I haven't visited these exact villages -- nor, to be fair, have I ridden a bike through the countryside; I feel imperiled enough in a bus or car -- but I have seen many places like this in Sichuan, Gansu, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Hunan, and elsewhere. Seriously, these eight minutes will tell you more about a range of current Chinese realities -- of migrant work patterns, of family planning, of the construction-uber-alles economic strategy -- than the standard three-day visit to Beijing. Very much worth watching.
 


Brian Glucroft also has a predictably excellent, frequently refreshed series of photos and views of "real China" on his site, Isidor's Fugue. To give one example of hundreds, this seaside recreational view from Zhuhai, where I have for odd reasons spent a lot of time:

I don't mean to make this an endlessly recursive loop, Escher-style, but some readers object to previous readers' objections to an earlier item about Fox News. The first item described a survey suggesting that Fox News viewers were flat-out worse-informed than people who relied on other news sources, especially NPR. The response questioned the survey's methods. Now, one more round from the readers.

1) The survey might be flawed, but the findings are still "true". A reader writes:

The pushback comments you published are quite correct about the shortcomings of the study and why it should be interpreted with caution.  Nonetheless, there are good reasons to conclude that Fox News does a poor job of delivering "news," that is to say accurate information about important current topics. 

As one reader whose comment you featured noted, this survey is consistent with the conclusion that Fox viewers are less knowledgeable (he or she used the term educated, but in a sense equivalent to knowledgeable) than NPR listeners.  There can be no doubt about this conclusion. 

If you polled large samples of regular Fox viewers and regular NPR listeners, which group would have the larger percentage of viewers/listeners accepting the existence of global warming, the validity of evolution, that we can't drill our way to energy independence, that that President Obama was born in Hawaii, or even that the Chevy Volt project was started by the very conservative Bob Lutz?  These are not obscure topics but have been featured over and over in media like Fox and NPR for several years.

Given the strong human tendency to avoid cognitive dissonance, what would happen to its viewership if Fox actually pursued real accuracy in its reporting?  Viewers would flee in droves.  The Fox business model depends avoiding real information on a wide array of topics. 

2) A 'tribal' world view. From another reader:

Think Progress often reports on the coverage density across the major news outlets for a given story.  And apparently there ARE some stories that Fox tries to avoid covering in detail, apparently because they would challenge the "Fox Worldview"....

But in general, I don't think Fox News' overarching negative contribution to the American conversation can be specifically described as a lack of knowledge, or a less well-informed viewership.  I think its bigger than that, and much, much worse. 

The Fox news programming, taken as a whole, promotes not just a particular ideological viewpoint but a larger, generalized point of view that is often toxic and even dangerous.  Part of it is the insistence that empirical evidence is wrong, or experts like scientists are corrupt and/or serving a particular ideological agenda.  So you get beliefs like supply side economics and its handmaiden, so called "dynamic scoring" of fiscal policies, a blunt refusal to confront climate change and a gross misunderstanding of health care policy. 

Even worse, the general worldview Fox promotes is deeply tribal, always casting doubts about and fostering fear of "the other". The Fox viewership is told that they are at risk, that they are victims, that everything they love and value is on the brink of destruction.  Of course that's ridiculous, it's how we arrive at conclusions like white males are oppressed and the Catholic Church is under attack.  But it's also dangerous, as it has created a powerful us vs. them dynamic in America that will almost certainly color everything we try to do for the next twenty years...

3) Not all Fox News programs are created equal:

The poll you cited is not the first one to show Fox viewers being uninformed.  Here is a rundown of several such polls.

Granted, PolitiFact's final determination is that Stewart was wrong to say that "every poll" shows Fox viewers to be the most misinformed.  However, every poll they linked shows NPR listeners to be significantly better informed than viewers of the generic "Fox News" category.  That said, viewers of specific Fox programs -- such as the O'Reilly Factor -- tend to do significantly better than the generic "Fox News" category as well.

p.s. You'll probably appreciate that at least one poll shows readers of The Atlantic (subscribe!) to top the list of the most informed news consumers.

4) Phone surveys are still OK:

Points 2 through 4 [of the critique] are all more-or-less valid criticisms, and I'm in broad agreement with him there--Farleigh Dickinson should have released the full crosstabs (I used to work at a polling firm, so this isn't totally uninformed speculation). 

But his first point would invalidate all phone-based polling, and that's a leap too far.  It's true that response rates have been falling; but smart people have looked into this and found that so far, it doesn't seem to be affecting results. 

Pew released a fascinating study of this just a few weeks ago that you might enjoy.  The short version is that they did a normal survey and compared the results to a "high effort" survey (with frequent callbacks, financial incentives to participate, etc) that got a much higher response rate.  Nevertheless, the results of the two surveys was mostly identical, with the exception that those who answered the normal survey were more likely to report civic engagement.  For the moment, the polling edifice remains intact.

5) If it's the viewers' fault, it's also Fox's:

[The previous reader] is right that it may be premature to draw the conclusion that Fox News actually turns out uneducated viewers as a result of watching Fox's programs.

However, I would suggest that if Fox was doing a decent job providing information to its viewers, then - even if they were ignorant of certain events or uneducated - the viewers should be coming away better informed about the facts.  This should be particularly true when Fox viewers are compared with people who watch no news at all. 

6) The perils of amateurs writing about statistics:

It's great that you are trying to be fair-minded by presenting a critique of the NPR-FOX study, but as is often the case with journalists who don't understand statistics as well as they might, you are swayed by somewhat weak arguments.

The main response to the criticism of the study is that there's no argument suggested that there is any bias in the sampling method that would lower the fox scores and raise the npr scores. [JF summary: Maybe the survey was flawed, but there's no reason to think that it was flawed in a way that worked against Fox.]...

The bias of the critic is also evident in their question.. " For example, what if Fox News reported particularly poorly on one or more of the topics included in the survey, but reported much better on some other topics not included?".

Couldn't we just substitute 'NPR' for 'FOX News' and have an equally valid question?

The failure to report margins of errors is a weakness, but again people so often make the mistake that scores within the margin of error indicate that the scores are essentially "equal". This is just plain wrong. The margin of error applies to a specific confidence interval (95% usually), but scores that are different but within the margin of error are by no means "equal". Instead, if Sample A is higher than sample B, but the difference between A and B is less than the margin of error, Population A is still more likely to score higher than Population B, even if that probability is less tan 95%. If I told you something was 85% likely to be correct, you would be foolish to ignore it because it didn't reach the 95% level, which of course has been arbitrarily set by researchers in the first place.

Let me finish by agreeing with the critic when they say ...
" You note in your post "that NPR aspires actually to be a news organization and provide 'information', versus fitting a stream of facts into the desired political narrative" . While this could be true, it is also possible that even if the survey results were correct there may be a bit of self-selection when choosing news networks.  In that case, ignorance could be the viewer's fault rather than the fault of Fox News."

The part about self-selection is almost certainly true and likely a huge factor in the effect.  Also, your claim that NPR aspires to be a provider of information and FOX news aspires to fill a narrative is way too strong. I agree that there is more 'narrative filling' by FOX than NPR, but you can't wave away a whole group of journalists on Fox that way. Shep Smith and Bret Baier are two Fox news journalists who are obviously conservative, but can't be fairly accused as supporting a narrative.

For the record, I agree that some figures on Fox -- Shepard Smith most of all, often Bret Baier, plus others -- conceive of their job in "normal" journalistic terms. But overall, to imagine that Fox and NPR are doing the same thing, just from different perspectives, strikes me as classic false equivalence. There is more to say, but this is plenty on the topic for the foreseeable future! Thanks to all who have weighed in.