I’m willing to take Jon Stewart’s word for it, myself.
Don’t forget misleading, deliberately distorted or mis-scaled graphs - another Fox favourite. Here’s a recent one. Here’s the same graph photoshopped to *actually *use its own damned scale.
It’s almost as if they were trying to make Obamacare look like it’s much less successful than it really is. But they couldn’t be doing that, what with being fair, balanced and fact-based. It’s a conundrum wrapped in an enema.
IOW, when the studies contradict the confirmation bias, embrace the confirmation bias.
Regards,
Shodan
IOW, when someone says something that you cannot dispute, put other words in their mouth.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Czarcasm
I’m confused, Deeg. You say
but then suggest it’s not biased?
I really wonder how effective your googling is, when science is concerned FOX has been caught with more than just climate change for their “creative” ways they have with the facts.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psysociety/2013/06/04/fox-news-fact-check-2/
Well, you’ve seen several showing that it’s viewers are considerably less well-informed, as well as extensive lists of the lies and omissions and general dishonesty of the network. And then you posted these:
…Which were then soundly torn apart by various people here who pointed out that the methodology was horribly flawed. And yet you’re still acting like it’s good evidence.
No, but they do have the courtesy to publicly and openly apologize for their mistakes. Every network makes errors; the question is, “are these legitimate errors?”. In Fox’s case, it’s very difficult to take that claim seriously. And no matter how much you want to claim that MSNBC is “just as bad”, the fact is that in the sole objective measure we can really take of how good or bad any individual network is, Fox loses to just about everything other than comedy shows and talk radio. Yeah, MSNBC ain’t great, but they’re still notably better.
And when it comes to anecdotal stuff… Okay, MSNBC has had some whoppers and some egregious mistakes. How many of those have gone on to completely dominate the cultural discourse on the left? What’s MSNBC’s Benghazi? What’s MSNBC’s “death panels”? One factor in this: they correct their shit. Notice how your article mostly mentions apologies and retractions, usually on air in the same time frame as it was originally announced, so that those who were misinformed are liable to see it?
. . . Are you sure?
The best thing about TDS is that you don’t have to take Jon Stewart’s word for it because they show you the evidence. Lots and lots of evidence. And not “let’s edit out half the sentence to change the meaning, like Hannity does” evidence either.
Really? Independent studies are bad methodology compared to the anecdotes that have been proffered in this thread? I would have expected that in the dowsing thread. If Fox is so bad can’t someone come up with a study that shows it?
I have never said Fox isn’t biased; clearly it is. The question is, is it more biased than other news outlets?
sigh That link does little to solve our debate because it doesn’t compare Fox to other networks. I absolutely believe that Fox gets science wrong. I absolutely believe that, for example, CNN get science wrong on occasion. Is Fox worse than CNN? That link doesn’t give us any clue.
No, they were not soundly ripped apart. There were objections by people who can’t stand the thought that Fox is no worse than any other outlet.
I don’t care one way or the other about Fox–really–and consider myself an impartial observer. Some of the arguments in this thread sound very similar to those made by dowsers. Find me some good studies that I can bring back to my friend that allow me to declare victory.
Please, by all means, if you have a decent methodology for a study to determine the bias of a news source, then by all means, fire away. That’s the problem here.
No, but my sources do.
:rolleyes:
Well, some people seem to be basing strong convictions on anecdotes so the bar for an independent study is pretty low.
:rolleyes:
It should be easy then to find evidence that CNN and others reported on those studies with the same spin and disregard for the evidence as FOX did.
So yes, as per your own admission, FOX is still worse when we take into account this and how they report climate change.
Please show me a study that proves the earth is round. No one is going to devote serious time and money to a formal study to prove the bleeding obvious, although conservatives and/or Fox might want to fund “studies” to show how wonderful they are.
For the most part the evidence is the weight of accumulated anecdotal incidents of Fox’s persistent pattern of egregious falsehoods, like the ones that have been cited here, along with the absence of such pattern among other broadcasters.
Here are two cites that further illustrate the point (my apologies if this was previously posted somewhere in this long thread, but I didn’t see it). This is a current analysis by MediaMatters of problematic reporting by all media, such as inaccuracies, lies, or omission of important news. It changes all the time but looking at the first page right now, there are 15 headlined items of such problem reporting and 15 more late-breaking items in the sidebar. Of the total of 30 reporting inaccuracies identified on the first page, 20 of them were committed by Fox News, 7 by other right-wing media, one by CNN, one is about an oil company website, and one is a critique of poor media coverage of climate change. To me that says a lot about Fox. It’s like lying was their special hobby.
There’s also this article from FAIR – it’s over ten years old but its takedown of Fox News is as valid today as it was then.
The study you linked compares how MSNBC and Fox News handled coverage of Romney and Obama during the last election. Not sure it’s fair to extrapolate that to general bias in all things, but even if it were true, the discussion isn’t primarily about bias – it’s about intentional deception. Sure MSNBC is biased, but they don’t typically lie. With Fox, lying is their business model. See the links above. This is part of the reason why, as someone already posted, Fox viewers as a group are so very poorly informed.
I think you need to read that article more carefully. Whoever wrote it was trying much too hard to build a case against MSNBC and not doing it very well. There were 10 alleged incidents. Going through them in order, they were an incident of bad taste, a genuine mistake in believing that an invited guest had not shown up because she had been booked into the wrong studio, a mistake in believing a satirical piece was true, possibly an intentional distortion of the Zimmerman tape, bad taste again, a rude off-camera gesture (WTF does that prove?), bad taste yet again vs. Laura Ingraham, probably genuine distortion about Rick Perry, bad taste yet again, and the fact that Ed Shultz has an independent contract with a union. So we have possibly two actual incidents of news distortion, which they corrected and for which they apologized. With Fox, news distortion is a way of life.
Again I suggest watching Aljazeera if you can. Reading these posts I can’t help thinking it must be a more healthy alternative than Fox.
Oh goodie! Some new Fox Fanbois! Maybe they can comment on this for once:
Look, the fact is that there’s not a good methodology for discovering bias. You kind of have to go with anecdotal collections and fact-checking. The best ersatz I can really think of is “how well-informed are the viewers on topics the news reports”, which doesn’t address bias per se, but addresses the far more fundamentally important topic of how effective the news is at bringing the truth to the masses.
See (listen up, nole.), this is the main issue when you compare news sources. Yeah, MSNBC is biased as hell. It knows its audience, and it knows which stories are going to interest them, and it knows those stories are going to make the left look good. But it doesn’t usually lie. This is what people keep talking about when they say that it’s biased but fair - the selection of news stories is tailored to make the left look good, but actually lying about the issue? Not a common theme. By contrast, Fox goes a step further - they’re biased in their story selection, and they also lie a lot. For example, the lie that they’re fair and balanced. This shows up when you ask Fox viewers about issues that matter and issues that Fox covers and they turn out to be way worse informed!
It’s like the difference between Think Progress/DailyKos/Raw Story and WND/Daily Caller/Gateway Pundit. Yeah, Think Progress has a heavy leftist bend, which they admit out front, and which their story selection tends to represent. They probably won’t run the story that makes Obama look bad. They’ll probably just run a fluff piece about how awesome Elizabeth Warren is instead. But they also won’t make up the story that makes Romney look bad. They won’t lie as ostensibly to support their goals. That’s the difference. And that’s why Fox news viewers are consistently misinformed on important issues - issues which Fox covers. I wonder if you polled Fox viewers on Benghazi and the IRS scandal, two drums Fox beat nonstop for the better part of a year, whether they’d be better-informed than other networks. Somehow, I doubt it.
Obviously, actually discerning “bias” is going to be difficult. Determining which network lies more or more often is hard to directly measure. But all the evidence we have points to Fox viewers being very ill-informed, and misinformed on issues Fox covers in particular. Throw on a particularly egregious list of whoppers (for which the network almost never apologizes or retracts), some particularly gross edits, and you can understand why most people who know about the evidence consider Fox news the worst, most biased, and most dishonest news network.
I’ve said numerous times that the OP asks “Is Fox News really all that bad,” not “Is Fox News really all that biased.” There can be bias and quality and there can be no bias but complete bullshit.
Fox News is bad for lying. A left-leaning media source that lied as much as Fox News did would indeed be just as bad but two things about that: Nobody has managed to find this mythical network, newspaper or website and even if they did (and even if it had the scope and influence of Fox News) that still wouldn’t change that Fox News sucks.
Unfortunately, that wouldn’t prove anything, because I suspect that people who choose Fox News as their primary source of information would test lower on topics the news doesn’t report, too.
Why? This AlterNet article from 2011 - which elsewhere in the article admits that the network “spread(s) misinformation and singlemindedly pursue(s) an extreme agenda” (lest you think it is sympathetic to the network) - says:
An older, white demographic with a lot of them college-educated is not known for being stupid. But they are wrong about the stuff that Fox reports, that is for sure.