Fox News, Empirically the place to go for fair and balanced election coverage

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@Scylla

Yes. I have recognized this. As I can see no way to correct for it, it’s hard to take it into account. What one can do instead is compare the reporting institutions against each other.

@Scylla

So, I feel comfortable in assuming that their are roughly equivalent opportunities for positive negative and neutral stories about both candidates.

If the interpretation of the data in the article were based on this assumption, its findings wouldn’t constitute any evidence either for or against a bias for any network; luckily, that’s not quite how it’s done, since there is in fact a gauge of how many positive/negative stories are generated by each candidate for the press to report on – the average of what has been reported on (the assumption here isn’t that the media, as a whole, is fair and balanced, but that it skews in all directions according to its target demographic – which sure seems reasonable, seeing how that’s where their money comes from).

This is quoted as 14% positive and 57% negative stories for McCain, and 29% negative/36% positive stories on Obama. Thus, the article shows that FOX skews toward positive reporting on McCain, and toward negative on Obama, and MSNBC the other way 'round:

             Avg           FOX/diff        MSNBC/diff

McCain+      14             22/+8             10/-4

McCain-      57             40/-17            73/+16

Obama+       36             25/-11            43/+7     

Obama-       29             40/+11            14/-15

[HMS_Irruncible]

@Scylla

This is true. But it’s not like McCain is campaigning against Kim Jong-il. If you think about it, in order to become a candidate for President at either the Democratic or the Republican level, you are going to be pretty deeply homogenized.

To us, identifying with one candidate or another it may seem that they are very deeply different, but as high ranking public politicians their demeanor and comportment is not subject to a very wide variance otherwise they would not be candidates for President.

So, I feel comfortable in assuming that their are roughly equivalent opportunities for positive negative and neutral stories about both candidates.

Well, then you’ve bought into probably the greatest fraud in modern critical thinking, that all candidates are pretty much equal except in how they’re portrayed by the news media. Think about how dangerous and foolish this assumption would be. It would blind you to recognizing any authentically bad candidate for president.

Going back to the ‘fairness’ of Fox, and I’m thinking of their coverage of “Obama’s baby mama”, the airtime given to the “Snobama” campaign gear such as coffee cupts, reporting last year that he had attended an Indonesian madrassa, reporting the fist bump as the “terrorist fist jab” (seriously, what the fuck?), and its complete misstatement of his comments in the 2001 interview on civil rights… I could go on and on. All of this was reported by Fox. I grant that 40%/40% may count as “balanced” in terms of air time, but if you think it’s fair, you’re completely out of your mind.

[cosmosdan]

@Scylla

The methodology is here:

Methodology | Pew Research Center Go to it.

I tried to wade through the pages of methodology to see if I could find the specifics on what they considered negative and what they considered positive. I couldn’t find it. They explain a lot about what they studied and why they chose certain shows.

They talk about tone and the fact that a story had to have 1.5 more negative or positive tone to make a column but I couldn’t find anything that actually explained what they used as a guide to declare something negative or positive.

That’s an awfully lot of work and print about methodology to then leave out those kind of specifics. Is that conspicuous by it’s omission? Did I just miss it?

The terms positive and negative are pretty subjective. For a study like that to be meaningful to me I’d like to see specific examples of what they measured as positive and negative.