I’m not following you here. Say Party A is achieving an advantage among independents. So, Party B starts their mudslinging, such as, “Party A drowns puppies on the weekends!” Independents don’t like mudslinging, so they turn off to … Party A? Party A isn’t the one mudslinging. Or, are you saying that independents are susceptible to being swayed by outlandish mudslinging?
Wallace was suggesting (and my own experience corroborates) that this mudslinging turns off voters to the WHOLE political process–in your example Party A, Party B, political coverage, the whole thing. It’s been a while since I read “The Weasel…”, but Wallace uses the word “cynical” a lot, and that seems like a good choice. The campaigning gets negative, and voters not strongly aligned with the bases, especially the young (according to Wallace), can get cynical (eg negative campaigning is not constructive, productive, interested in progress, and it gets selfish, self-absorbed, bitter, contentious, breeds mistrust between politicians and the public, can bring politicians’ character and moral alignments into question (both the accuser and accused), etc. etc.–this just off the top of my head in 2 minutes…I’m sure the reader’s imagination can supply many more reasons this breeds cynicism and other negative reactions not limited to just one party).
Bit of an edit to my post just above–a more specific answer to your question that I just thought of, that was one of the key elements to the Wallace article (thanks DrumGod for bringing it up), was that in your scenario, Party A achieves an advantage among the independents, so Party B starts mudslinging. What now are Party A’s options–they can (a) stay out of the negative campaigning (in which event both bases are likely to see them as weak, having no comeback, etc.) OR (b) join them (turning the whole campaign negative)–in other words Party A doesn’t have a choice. (Wallace does a far better job describing this, McCain’s dilemma, when GW Bush started veering the 2000 campaign into negative waters.)
I have to take issue with this assumption:
Maybe some of them do. But many do not. In fact, based on responses in this very thread (and elsewhere online) there is no shortage of Fox viewers who are of the opinion that all of the other channels are part of the liberal media cabal, in the pockets of the Democrats, and Fox News is, um, fair and balanced.
Exhibit A.
All the left wants to do is show how not awesome the US is!
By itself, given PolitiFact’s uneven reputation, this means little. But as part of a growing chorus of people, institutions and studies that claim that Fox News lie, it should be included.
This is a bit misleading. The only statements that end up on politifact are those whose veracity is in question. Statements that are clearly true such as “An American ambassador was killed in an attack on the Bengazi compound”, don’t end up on politifact. So just counting the proportion of politifact statements that are false overestimates the total proportion of things that Fox says that are erroneous. Since the proportion of statements that are controversial is likely to vary from source to source, it is even difficult to compare the proportion between news agencies. Probably the best measure would be to compare the total number of false statements made.
‘Over half the time’ is incorrect. FOX News only lies 49% of the time.
So ‘half the time’ is accurate.
The blown kiss at the end was fantastic.
a true journalist!
Fair and balanced, just like their parent network?
Three times over the last 24 hours, Baltimore Fox affiliate WBFF has played a misleadingly edited clip from last week’s National “Justice for All” March in Washington, D.C. to make it sound like protesters were calling on people to “kill a cop.”
“At this rally in Washington, D.C. participants chanted, ‘We won’t stop, we can’t stop, so kill a cop,’” WBFF’s Melinda Roeder said during a Sunday night report about the murder of two police officers in New York City, before playing a truncated version of a protest video from C-SPAN.
But when you watch past the point where WBFF cut off, you can hear the full chant had a different message: We won’t stop. We can’t stop. ‘Til killer cops. Are in cell blocks.
This is especially insidious, because the edited clip DOES sound like “kill a cop,” while the unedited clip from CSPAN shows that the reporter, who very clearly enunciated “kill a cop,” had to know she was lying.
Unbelievable, even for Fox. No matter how cynical you get, you can’t keep up.
Why can’t something be done about outright lying like this?
Federal broadcast sanctions?
How about the protesters sue for defamation?
What about inciting violence?
As I recall in the Trayvon Martin case the Zimmerman phone call to the police was edited by NBC and they aired this edited version. This editing gave the appearance of Zimmerman saying something very different than the actual words he used. NBC admitted to this. You can look it up.
Now a couple questions to you.
In that event were you concerned about the outright lying ?
In that event were you advocating Federal Broadcast sanctions ?
That depends-What has this station said about what they did? Have they admitted anything? Have they apologized?
Fox News doesn’t really have much to do with Fox affiliates. WBFF is owned and operated by the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair, as it happens, has its own nasty history, but it isn’t Fox News. (In 2004, Sinclair refused to allow its stations to air a a news program that included a simple reading of the names of every soldier killed in Iraq because it had a “political agenda,” but then later that very same year pre-empted the networks’ programs to air the Swiftboaters’ “documentary.”)
Here is the followup:The Fox affiliate claims that they misheard what was on the tape, and they apologized for the “mistake”…but they were the ones that edited it to cut the chant short to make their “mistake” possible in the first place.
In other words, they were sorry they were caught.