At least with that, one could wave their hands and say this is a very important issue that the mainstream media is avoiding because they are liberal, and foxnews is the only unbiased news source with the balls to blow the lid off it. Note, I don’t agree with this, but it’s an easy argument to make.
But, when you specifically ignore a newsworthy event like the jobs report, and only ignore it when it favors one particular political ideology. Not only ignore it, but if you do report it, report it as if it might be a bad thing (Their current lead business story headline is: “Stocks Slide on Heels of Better-than-Expect Jobs Report”). An event that happens like clockwork every month so you know it is coming and exactly when. An event that is almost certainly the most important news event of that day, particularly when the jobs picture has been so shaky for years. Then, you cease being a news organization altogether.
There is absolutely no way to defend it, which is why none of our resident foxnews defenders have even tried to wave this one away.
aldiboronti does have a point - I like truth and the reporting of facts - sometimes it’s good to get away from facts, and Fox News is a pretty good “no go zone” for factual reporting.
That’s an interesting perspective, but it ignores a couple of contradictions. Fox News’s defenders will dismiss its inaccuracies by pointing out that CBS and NBC have inaccuracies too, and so Fox is no worse than others, but they’ll leave out the fact that Dan Rather and Brian Williams suffered consequences and no one at Fox ever does. (At their best, they’ll cite Rather and Williams as examples of liberal bias, and since no one at Fox News ever gets fired or suspended, that Fox must be a paragon of journalism.) And as to your view that Fox’s conservatism is a needed counterweight to a pervasive liberal bias, if that’s their reason for existing could they ever really call themselves “fair and balanced”?
Not only that, but underscoring the entire argument that aldiboronti makes is the presumption that there is “liberal bias” in all the other networks. This is absolute nonsense, though conservatives never tire of trying to prove it.
The reality is that the “bias” of commercial networks is a bias in favor of their revenues and, by and large, of the dominant power structure. By that I mean that they will generally be biased toward sensationalized tripe that attracts audience share and hence advertising revenue, like the size of Kim Kardashian’s ass rather than news stories about things that matter, and will generally be supportive of corporate interests in domestic matters and US government interests in international matters. The exception is Fox News, which does all of those things, too, but first and foremost functions as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. That function, and that kind of flagrant disregard for facts in blind support of ideology, is stunningly unique in a major news organization and is reminiscent of Pravda in the former Soviet Union.
I made no such assumption. If you perceive no liberal bias in some news channels, why then there is none to you and Fox is bad, for ‘nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so’.
My own belief, for what it’s worth, is that there is no such animal as unbiased news reporting.
One has to understand the point of view of the typical Fox News watcher. These people have it tough. They are constantly under assault by an unfair world in which all media outside the Murdoch realm are owned by liberals, public schools are controlled and staffed by liberals (hence the need for home schooling where creationism can be properly taught), colleges and universities are all infested with liberals and liberal thought, Wikipedia is overrun by liberals (hence Conservapedia), Congress is forced to get advice from godless liberal elitist cliques like the National Academies of Science (which believes in both global warming and evolution, for God’s sake), and the whole of Europe has been overrun by godless communists.
So how do you convince Fox News watchers that the actual problem is that reality has a liberal bias? A good forceful boot to the head seems like a good start!
And yet they completely, passionately, obsessively LOVE AMERICA! Given that they loath most Americans and a good portion of the things in America, I can’t figure out how that works.
Viewers of other networks are just viewers; Fox viewers are more slaveringly, fiercely loyal than a rescue dog that suddenly finds itself being fed medium-rare filet mignon every day. If a particular “news” network is going to tell these yokels that they are smart and beautiful and everything they believe is true, and their enemies are all dumbasses who know nothing, while all the other news outlets (commonly referred to as “the rest of the world”, or just simply, “reality”) have all been telling the yokels that they are the dumbasses, well … who you gonna love, baby?
In a sense all the other networks are to a large degree interchangeable – they basically report news. Fox News is … different.
I was in a doctors office today and was treated to Fox News as I waited (as if I didn’t already feel bad enough). They did a story about a “drunken mob” attacking a synagogue in the UK. Who participated in this mob was never stated. But someone yelled “kill the Jews” and several people were arrested. They paired this story with one about the UK cracking down on Islamist extremists, specifically mentioning attacks on Jews. The inference couldn’t have been more obvious.
My bullshit meter was naturally pinged by the “drunken” part of the mob. Drunken Muslim extremists? So I checked out the story when I got home. Turns out it was a bunch of drunk “thugs” who got in a fight with some guy outside the synagogue and tried to follow him when he ran inside. No Muslims anywhere. But I’m sure their audience believes it was just another terrorist attack. Outright lie? No. And it was easy to find the real story if you looked. But I doubt that fact checking ever crosses their viewers’ minds.
The jobs report came out today, and it was worse than expected. So, unlike months when the numbers are better than expected, Foxnews.com decided to report on it this month with the headline:
