The White House has engaged Fox News in a feud over their status as an impartial news network. The White House claims Fox is biased towards the Republican Party, not only putting Republican messages on the air as "news", but also doing research to aid the Republican party. On the other side. Fox claims to be fair and neutral, although they admit that they do ask hard questions of the administration to keep them honest, and they claim to have done the same for the Bush administration.What is the truth of this? Maybe I can help by pointing out that Fox is not a Republican TV channel. They do admit to having a conservative slant, but to counter that, they claim that conservatism simply reflects the mainstream point of view of the USA. Fox News has claimed repeatedly that the other news channels have a Liberal bias, so Fox is simply representing the American people against the extreme leftists on the other channels.
I personally cannot agree with Fox about the other channels being liberal, but that's just my opinion. But I don't think anybody argues with the assumption that Fox is conservative, and pushes conservative points of view. It's just a question of "How hard to the right do they spin?".
There has been a mountain of evidence gathered about Fox News. Of course there are hundreds of video clips of biased reporting whenever a Fox news person is caught promoting a Republican point of view regardless of the facts. There are also surveys which try to evaluate the knowledge of Fox viewers, to see which "facts" have been absorbed contrary to the accepted truth. One example would be Dick Cheney saying there was a connection between Al Quaida and Saddam Hussein, then years later, he admitted there was no evidence. Fox News viewers were the last to become aware of the admission.
Another way to approach the subject is in personnel. For example, Tony Snow, one of the first Fox news people, had originally worked as a Republican speechwriter before coming to Fox News. And after he left, he went to be President Bush's press secretary. There are other examples, but Tony Snow is the most obvious.
Also, you have endorsements from the Republicans themselves. Dick Cheney was famously quoted as saying he spent most of the time watching Fox News because they were more accurate.
And finally, you can call into question times that Fox News actually stepped in and helped shape events directly. Such as being the first network to call a win for Bush in 2000. More recently, for helping organize the Teabag party protests against Obama.
So I don't think it's any surprise that Fox News leans toward the Republicans. It's just a question of how far.
It looks to me like Fox News plays it this way: they lean as far to the right as they can without losing their viewers or their status as a "Fair and Balanced" news organization. And, actually since there is no official standard for what is fair and balanced, the only thing that really matters is retaining the maximum viewers. And, of course not losing their sponsors. Some sponsors have already started avoiding the most biased programs, such as the Glen Beck Show, but that is not a loss to Fox News as a whole, they simply move those sponsors to different time slots.
If Fox came right out and said "We are not here to be fair, we are here to get the Republicans elected", they might lose some viewers. But it would not be the end of Fox News, as they are really close to saying that already, and most viewers would cheer them on if they did.
Fox wants to keep calling themselves fair and balanced, and nobody can really stop them from doing that. It gets more viewers. It doesn't really limit them or force them to be more truthful. And any attacks on them from the White House only helps them portray themselves as the victims of a left wing conspiracy.
Some people say there is no real left wing version of Fox News. To find a news program that balances Fox on the left, I think you would have to go all the way to the Comedy Network. "The Daily Show" starring Jon Stewart is a comical look at the news. Weirdly enough, it is one of the top actual news programs in the USA, with many people trusting it more than the regular (non comical) news shows. I always thought that they had won an Emmy for for doing the news, but actually they won seven Emmies for "Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Series". On the other hand, they did win two awards from "Television Critics Association" for "Outstanding Achievement in News & Information". (They also won a couple of Peabody awards for News.)
So I guess that just about covers the whole spectrum of US television news.
Back in the Henry Luce days of the 1950s, there used to be an old saw that went, 'LIFE is the magazine for people who can't read; TIME is the magazine for people who can't think.'
ReplyDeleteWe could probably update that to, 'FOXNews is the channel for people who can neither read nor think.'
FOX's official contention is that their commentators are commentators - i.e. expected to comment - but that their news reporting itself was 'fair and unbiased.'
In fact, that has been adequately demonstrated not to be true. FOX reporters and anchors consistently use weasel phrases such as, 'Some people say ...' to inject unsubstantiated opinion into their reportage, essentially committing the sin of injecting editorial opinion into 'news' reports.
The essence of professional journalism is reporter independence, but interviews with former FOX employees have consistently indicated that FOX executives exercise a considerable degree of control over the content of reporting.
This, I suppose, can be very attractive to an audience that neither reads nor wants to think.