True TV Facts!

The TVs in the West Wing that I've seen (with the exceptions of the quad-tvs, and the ones in Tony Snow's office) are tuned to the Fox News Channel. Meanwhile, across town at Foggy Bottom, the internal TV doohickie system at the State Department shows CNN International.

The State Department was, as far as I recall, the only IC agency that contributed to the Iraq War NIE that emphatically stated Iraq did not have a WMD program -- or something along those lines.

Clearly, the TV channel that one watches does not in and of itself make him right or wrong in his estimations about the world. The TV channel one watches is, however, part and parcel of his general view and understanding of the world; it is a direct result, I'd bet, of a pervasive culture in an agency of the federal government.

The questions are these: do people who have a better understanding of the world around us watch CNN International? Or does watching CNN International (as opposed to Fox News) help provide one with a better understanding of the world? Or is all this totally unrelated to the fact that the State Dept. in the run-up to the war was correct and all the other intelligence agencies were evidently wrong?