Right. Spreading fallshoods and and purposely highlighting and repeating false conclusions about limited data in order to influence a presidential election.
Do you honestly think that matters to the majority of the voting public. Do you think the majority of the voting public gives a news anchor a lot more weight than a commentator. I know some do, but if the problem was impact on the nation by changing a presidential election by presenting false information then you have to be realistic about how an election is swayed. Rather than spend time on the many serious issues we face Fox relentlessly pursued the minor issue of a few slected comments by Reverand Wright and made it into a huge, “be scared of the black man” issue morning noon and night Here’s Chris Wallace’s contribution Here’s Snow not as Fox anchor but it’s an example of his abilty to be a partisan hack.
Then there was the William Ayers loose connection to Obama and the same tactic. HAmmer it morning noon and night to scare voters with fabricated bullshit.
I see that things have moved on, and that nobody has actually bother to tackle my main which is that confirmation bias and selective perception are the actual root cause inform one’s opinions in this, and not any particular quality of Fox News.
If someone was actually interested in debating they might cite or create a study that performed a random sampling of items from fox news against other sources to attempt to discern a qualitative difference.
We’ve seen such in another, and of course it failed to demonstrate anything particularly egregious that was unique to Fox.
Therefore, until someone produces conclusive evidence to the contrary I maintain that people who selectively disparage fox news or those who trust as as being simple partisan hacks behaving predictably according to known and measurable tendencies to bias through their own heuristics.
If we are actually looking for data, Wikipedia cites several studies.
I’m not a big fan of polls. Some like public policy polling show fox news as being percieved as most accurate, but we know that perceptions aren’t necessary accurate.
A study by Rasmussen found Fox News to be the second most biased (next to CBS.)
Interestingly:
" A study published in November 2005 by Tim Groseclose, a professor of political science at UCLA, comparing political bias from such news outlets as the New York Times, USA Today, the Drudge Report, the Los Angeles Times, and Fox News’ Special Report, concluded “all of the news outlets we examine, except Fox News’ Special Report and the Washington Times, received scores to the left of the average member of Congress.”
this goes to support an earlier argument I made that there is a liberal bias to most other news sources, thus enhancing the value of fox as a dissenting and balancing view.
In short, the sampling of studies cited in wikipedia seems to strongly support my notion that Fox is not especially mendacious as compared to other news sources, and the real issue with its detractors is simple confirmation bias.
They don’t like Fox because it leans right and they lean to the left. They are simply incapable of overcoming their prejudices and thus reality remains hidden to them.
CBS what? Nightly news or prime time entertainment?
Note that they were looking at one segment of the Fox news organization.
Dissenting and balancing are not the same thing.
“He lied and said it was 70 degrees outside, it was really 80 so I lied and said it was 90.”
That is not why they don’t like FNC. That is the victimization that FNC likes to push. When they do something wrong the cling to the idea that they are a dissenting voice.
Lying is not providing a dissenting voice. Does that make sense to anyone other than me?
As mentioned already the current position regarding “climategate” and the global warming issue should be enough to demonstrate something particularly egregious of FOX, so give it up.
I want to hear an honest conservative view that is made up of facts. I think it’s crucial for informed citizens to hear both sides of the argument if it’s based in factual reality. As in. Here are all the pertinent facts, and as a conservative here’s my take on it or something similar for liberals. My problem with FNC is not that they lean to the right. I’ll gladly listen to any honest conservative. I like George Will for that exact reason.
My problem with FNC is that they purposely blur the lines of actual news and commentary and consistently run dishonest reports filled with distortions of the facts. Sure , some factual details are included and some segments are worse than others but as a whole I find their purposeful blurring of the lines between commentary and news and the sheer volume of willful distortion of facts to indicate that they have little regard for the truth. IMO that means calling themselves a news channel and repeating “fair and balanced” is another example of their dishonesty.
This is starting to resemble the UHC debate, during a criticism of an incident in Florida, someone presented a conservative opinion piece that outlined various flaws in European health care systems. But it was just one flaw from each country, lumped together to make UHC sound bad.
There was a car commercial once that said, “better mileage than car y, better handling than car x, and a better maintenance record than car z.” So not better than any of those cars.
Here we a criticism of FNC, with a few recent examples.
These criticisms aren’t addressed. Instead, it is countered: we have one example from News Week in 1996. Something from CBS in 2000. A memory-hole at CNN also from 2000. And then a handful of random comments about MSNBC.
But all of that gets lumped as, “The MSM sucks too.”
What that tells me is that no one station, or no one news agency, is comparable to FNC. It has to be MSM, what ever that means.
Because they figured out the flaw in news media: People don’t like hearing things that go against their beliefs. If raising taxes turned out to increase government revenue. If the cash for clunkers program improved car sales. If the stimulus lowered unemployment. Conservatives would turn off the channel.
So they built a station around the idea that they can repeat back to people their opinions. I’m pretty sure they tested this concept with various individuals and found that for some reason a sub set of conservatives responded best to being told what they wanted to hear.
Rush as been very successful with this concept for years, FNC took that and ran with it.
FNC is, after all, in the business of delivering an audience to advertisers. That’s it. The station is targeting a specific demographic, just like ESPN and Lifetime. They have cornered the market for people that don’t give a shit about journalistic integrity–that is a group that should be dismissed.
I wonder that as well. It doesn’t change my opinion of how they operate. It simply makes me sad about our society in general.
I can only conclude that fewer left leaning folks get their news and commentary from TV. I don’t like them at all and I watch them as much as I do any other TV news source.
I think media matters has done an ongoing study of thier accuracy but I’ll check for others as well.
I never understood why the story at the root of “Rathergate” was supposed to be such a big deal. So Bush may have skated on wealth and family connections to get out of possible Vietnam service. Who gives a fuck? The way Kerry was swiftboated, it was fairly obvious that someone’s actual war record, if any, doesn’t mean a thing.
BTW, one has to notice here that several of the guys involved in the swiftboat (Marc Morano in the forefront) were involved later in the misrepresentation of the CRU hack - climategate emails!
Same tactics. So much so that many in the science climate community called the affair the SwiftHack.
I really hate to tell you this, since it’s obviously one of your pet issues, but I downloaded that file, and decompressed it. less than 1% of that file was emails. The vast majority was data and program files. Damning ones. Just that most news consumers can’t understand it, so Fox harps on the smoke, instead of the gun.
I honestly think you are grasping at straws. So would any neutral observer, I think.
You posted a link with a transcript of Wallace, interviewing Dodd and Schumer (hostile witnesses?), about Obama’s relationship with that bombastic whackjob Rev Wright. He wouldn’t let the senators duck the question about whether people should be concerned about the kind of church Obama attended for 20 yrs, the guy who married him, baptized his kids, etc. Clearly Obama knew this guy and had some sort of relationship with him. Seeing as we knew so little about Obama before he got elected, as he had very little experience (comparitively speaking, for a presidential candidate), I’m really trying to see why that line of questioning would be unexpected.
Surely you don’t equate that with intentionally pushing forged documents and lying about their authenticity, do you?