Please be more specific.
He doesn’t like Lou Dobbs, therefore all of CNN is suspect.
Maybe that’s why Fox won’t give the spotlight to even one liberal (or even moderate conservative) otherwise their viewers will poo-poo the entire network.
Nah. I wouldn’t die for that.
Anyway, nice speech, but it’s a bit off topic. IMO. The issue at hand is not whether or not there is bias in the media, it’s how well people, whose primary news source is a single outlet, are factually informed. In the study linked to by ElvisL1ves, the source polls asked persons questions based on specific facts, such as whether whether Iraq was involved in 9/11, and whether nuclear, chemical and/or biological weapons had been found in Iraq’s arsenal after the invasion. The preponderance of fact indicates the answer to both questions is no.
The study shows clearly that a large majority of viewers of FOX News held one or more beleifs at variance with fact on the chosen subjects. To be fair, the percentages viewers having one or more of the listed misperceptions is almost as high for viewers of the Big Three networks, and non-trivial for viewers of CNN. I think what shows up particularly well is how remarkably poor television news is at transmitting any but the most simplistic facts. I’ve long been of the opinion that to get one’s news mainly from TV is to pretty much guarantee one’s ignorance, and the results of this study seem to lend some support to that notion.
In a quick skim of the study, I did not notice any particular examination of why FOX News viewers might carry more misperceptions than viewers of other networks. I don’t watch that network much, but their straight news content doesn’t seem much more biased to the right than the other major US nets. It doesn’t take much thought to conclude, however, that the incessant, hard right-wing editorializing by the network’s various pundits, with clearly a lower standard for accuracy due to its nature as ‘opinion’, and taking up what seems to be a majority of the the network’s prime evening airtime, may have something to do with viewers’ misperceptions.
I think this question boils down to what is the “truth” which isn’t easilly derived.
The conservative audience is the most informed in a way. Conservatives listen to more talk radio, read more newspapers, and watch more news analysis TV than liberals.
I have seen several studies on this and I could probably find one if I tried but it should be self-evident. Liberal talk radio fails repeatedly while conservative talk radio soars. In Boston, (BOSTON!) we have little in the way of successful liberal broadcast media yet there are two conservative talk radio superstars on different channels (Howie Carr and Jay Severin). Fox News is responding to a need but the audience also watches CNN and CSPAN to be sure. This pattern is nationwide. Liberals can’t seem to grab ahold of a large audience unless you included the NYT and the Washington Post yet that seems tenuous. One has to ask where liberals are getting their information. It would have to be through books and word of mouth as best as I can tell.
But…but…they have Alan Colmes as their token librul! And he appears to be the limpest dick in the universe, which actually fits quite well with their target audience’s preconceived notions about libruls.
-Joe
The purpose of modern network news is not to inform. It is to entertain. People want to see talking heads shouting down other talking heads who don’t share the viewers ideology and recognizable figures who share their righteous indignation. They want clips of tanks and fighter planes blowing up terrorist caves and Americans waving the flag and all that shit.
Wow. Anybody who would call Howie Carr’s audience “well-informed” either hasn’t ever listened to his show or hasn’t ever listened to anything else.
I’m guessing millions of people watch O’Reilly. What better poll to prove idiocy?
I used to work with you?
(checking my ID) Whew! I guess not.
Yeah, but Fox rots from the head down:
The bias of CNN and MSNBC is still debatable; at Fox, it is corporate policy.
Anyone here believe:
a) there is evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda have been found
b) that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq,
c) that world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq.
Why would you measure informedness by the number of hours of media absorbed, especially when the veracity of that media is one of the points of contention? The obvious way to measure informedness is by measuring the degree to which one’s beliefs correlate with reality. How that informedness (or lake thereof) came about is a separate question.
Nice try, dropzone. I should have mentioned that the guy died. I forget from what. Thus I wasn’t quite as hesitant to mention the name and the abusive acronym. He was one of those people about whom most others would say, “He means well.” This, of course, after a quick jolt of some smart pills or a round robin of smacking each other in the head.
One of the most telling things I can remember about him was that he was big into the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer (or whatever the actual name of it was) and he had all the magazines and booklets they supplied on how to do neat and fabulous tricks with it. He had cut out all the pages and put each one in a separate vinyl page protector and stored them in a binder. But before he did that he highlighted in yellow all the “interesting or important” parts of the article in question. Get this: every page was solid yellow! He might as well have dipped the page in yellow hi-liter. One of a kind.
A friend of mine who was a television writer and producer and did work with Sixty Minutes once told me that, after you take out all the crap - “Good Evening I am blah blah blah”, “after the break blah blah blah”, “and here is blah blah blah with the blah blah blah” - the script for an average evening 30 minute news telecast is less than the number of words on **one page ** of a daily newspaper.
His point was that anyone whose primary source of news is television is necessarily an ill informed idiot. He was very big on this because the TV station he worked for used to advertise that “most Australians rely on Channel 9 for their news.”
He’s right. The “news hole” for a 30 minute newscast is 10-12 minutes. That’s after subtracting the open, breaks, weather, sports, teases and the close.
In Australia you get some funny views of the news media because of the ABC. It is a government funded, non partisan (so they say) broadcasting network on both radio and TV. Whatever their imperfections may be they provide a very varied view of all subjects.
Because of their non-reliance on advertising they can be far less bound to the “sound bite.” Sometimes they play an entire press conference and you get to hear some politician use his “sound bite de jour” over and over again to let the TV stations get it. It gets to the point of laughability.
FOX has O’Reilley, Geraldo, and Ollie North all claiming to be journalists and you pick on CNN and Dobbs (who I grant is pretty incompetent). Also remember CNN has Nancy Grace when it comes to just bad - and being able to suck the intelligence out of a network.
Go ahead and try and do me a favor, don’t use one of Murdock’s minions as your source, OK?
But Nancy Grace looked so serious when I was sitting in a burger joint and she was talking about the Anna Nicole Smith “crisis”!
-Joe
I don’t think it is. One of the things that bothers me about it is the whole foundation of its premise. How is perception — as subjective a thing as can be — to be measured and quantified? There is perception in every step of the process, from the perception of the questioner to the perception of the answerer. The responses aren’t necessarily how people perceived what they saw on the news, but how they perceived what they saw in the questions. Biases, defense mechanisms, prejudices — these all kick in when perception is exercised. And then, from there, it’s a jump from the frying pan to the fire when the goal is to find misperception. Maybe the questioner misperceived the responder. Maybe the questioners own questions were themselves perceptions.
It’s like those damned political tests designed to determine whether you’re a libertarian, leftist, rightist, or authoritarian. There are so many of the questions that you’d like to rephrase or that you answer “yes, but”. Given that there is only “yes or no”, you have to decide between two substandard responses and leave your whole perception behind.
As an example, the reviewer comments that US intelligence denies Iraqi involvement with Al Qaeda, and it is from that premise that the pollsters established a lack of connection to be the “correct” perception. And yet, at the time the study was conducted (2003), that position was highly controversial. In 2002, a senior Al Qaeda operative (Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi) told the CIA that Al Qaeda had been training in Iraq. It was only later revealed that the CIA thought he was lying. But the pollsters decided that the CIA was wrong about the original report and right about the later report, rather than the other way around. Maybe the CIA lied about the guy lying. If they’d lie about one thing, why not about the other?
It seems to me that all the study measured in terms of perception was the level of trust that the various viewerships had put into the Bush administration. And you really didn’t need a study to tell you that people who tended at the time to trust Bush were more likely to (a) watch Fox News than PBS and (b) believe what Bush said.
Bah. Dobbs, I figure, is CNN’s way to placate the Righties such that CNN can say ‘we present the viewpoint of the Right - look at Lou’.
I think the media on the right is peopled with people just like the ones you see on this board who, in the face of all evidence to the contrary when it’s presented to them, insist on retaining whatever belief they hold. And their audience is comprised of the same.
We’ve all been in situations where we attempted to fight someone’s ignorance and eventually gave up when it became clear that it was a futile endeavour. I was both pleased and dismayed when this study showed why; logic has nothing to do with it. Those of us who attempt to discuss matters expecting logic to persuade people are, it seems, thinking that if we only clap our hands, Tinkerbell will turn up.
IMHO it’s one of the most important studies to come out of psychology in a long time. Scary, depressing, but important.
And it may mean that the left has to get a lot better at appealing to emotion than it is. Perhaps what’s wanted are stories of suffering Iraqi moms, young Iraqi kids in hospitals, etc. to win over those who operate on feeling rather than logic.