Leave aside the ignorance of this professor’s comments. What business does he have telling his students what news channels to watch?

Jennifer Kabbany of the College Fix reports.

Professor Tells Students Fox News Viewers Are Ignorant

People who watch Fox News are less informed than people who get their news from other outlets such as MSNBC and CNN, a University of Arizona professor told his upper-level government class recently, according to a recording of the comments obtained by The College Fix.

The student who taped parts of Associate Professor Pat Willerton’s “Politics, Policy and Governing: The U.S. and the World” class on Oct. 8 said the remarks were couched in a larger argument that Fox News is a propaganda arm of the Republican Party.

The 25-second clip provided by the student, who asked to remain anonymous, starts right after that assertion about Fox News and the Republican Party, a remark that prompted audible gasps from the large room full of students.

The recording shows Willerton defending his comments as students continued to murmur, saying: “They use government, they use, well – c’mon, look at the studies, look at the studies. If you look at MSNBC, ABC, CNN, all of these cases, the average viewer knows more than the person who doesn’t consult any source. When they survey people who watch Fox News regularly, they know less.”

The “studies” Willerton cited to students to back up his claim was a controversial 2010 survey conducted by the University of Maryland-based WorldPublicOpinion.org that was touted by many left-leaning news organizations as proof Fox News misinforms its viewers.

However, Fox News published a point-by-point refutation of that survey shortly after it was released stating in part “researchers themselves were clearly misinformed and frequently picked incorrect or left-wing biased answers as the ‘correct’ ones.” That was never brought up in Willerton’s class.

The student who provided the clip told The College Fix that the professor often criticizes Republicans in the beginning of his class, which is reserved for remarks on current events before the academic lecture begins.