Just wanted to clear up a couple items from your post:

The PIPA study was not my personal work although it was performed by my company. I take no credit for thinking this one up (it was PIPA’s research that was executed by our Government/Academic practice headed by Dr. Michael Dennis.

I believe the call from News Corp went to Dr. Gale Metzger, also of Knowledge Networks. It’s a bit legendary at KN. It’s a pitfall of doing both public policy work and client work. Sometimes the public policy side comes up with results that aren’t appreciated by some clients. I’m glad we never did work for Enron as I would not have enjoyed fielding calls from Lay or Skilling!

As far as selection bias of NPR listeners/PBS viewers, the poll was conducted amongst a genpop random sample so we ended up with a natural incidence of the NPR/PBS audience. Whether this audience is more intellectual and better able to separate truth from fiction in news stories is a discussion which will require more beer or wine to complete. An Annenberg study found that Daily Show viewers are significantly more informed about current events than regular network viewers. To me this ties with John Cleese’s observation that people have better recall of things that they laughed at. The regular evening news is often so depressing that I for one want to forget it as soon as possible.

The study of advertising engagement comparing FNC viewers with CNN and MSNBC was conducted by Maura Clancey (who leads the KN/SRI media team) in conjunction with Paul Rittenberg at Fox News.

My favorite Fox News tidbit which I culled from our massive profile database is that there is nearly perfect correlation between how often people watch Fox News and how much they enjoy NASCAR. If I ran FNC (a completely absurd hypothetical) I would sponsor a NASCAR car. (Here’s why) Perhaps they already do? Or if there’s already perfect correlation maybe it’s redundant. I’m too busy watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to know!

(Of course these opinions are my own and don’t reflect the opinions of my colleages at KN, our clients, or of the company itself. Not that a company can actually have opinions but that’s a different issue.)