Frankly, I think the whole search for a ‘fair and balanced’ news outlet is the wrong way to approach things.
There’s no such thing as a completely fair and balanced news source. All of them have their biases. If not political, then geographical or social. The murder of a an American child gets more attention than the murder of 10,000 Rwandans. The nightly news is much more likely to focus on issues that affect California, New York, and Atlanta, since that’s where the influencers of the news are.
Rather than searching for the mythical unbiased source, I think you’re better to listen to all sides, assuming they all have their own biases. I watch Fox sometimes, but I also watch MSNBC. I read National Review, and I also sometimes read The Nation or The New Republic. I listen to Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olb… Okay, that last bart isn’t true. Both of them are bloviating gasbags. I can’t stand more than a few minutes of either one.
What we should care more about is bias that is hidden. If someone tells you they are non-partisan but bias everything towards a partisan viewpoint, that’s bad. I believe much of the mainstream media does this. But the fact is, on election night in 2008, hosts on CNN were weeping tears of joy, and hosts on Fox were crying in their milk. That tells me that both sides are biased. I just wish they had signs that said, “Get your LIBERAL news here! Get your CONSERVATIVE news here!” Then people wouldn’t be duped by them.
The only way you get to fair and balanced is to listen to both sides with an unprejudiced mind, and draw your own conclusions.
These are not meaningless, amorphous terms. I’m not interested in responding to this specious line of questioning in detail, but it is quite possible, for instance, to define certain, well known, hot button issues in terms of “left and right” and to measure how much time is given to advocacy or defense of those issues from eaither side. It’s also possible to define opinions in terms of whether they support or attack one political party over another and whether they attack or support the sitting President.
Really? That’s how you think? I don’t think that way at all. MSNBC is clearly left biased from my perspective, and I’m a lefty. Having a preferred side does not prevent anyone from being able to discern unfairness or bias, even if it’s in the direction they favor.
No, but I would think that they lacked intelligence and/or critical thinking skills if they believed in Young Earth Creationism. The existence of God is unfalsifiable, YEC is not. It’s the same with a belief that Fox News is not biased. That’s a provably false position. It’s a crackpot view. I don’t judge anyone for watching it, enjoying it or necessarily even agreeing with it (though I have limits with the latter), but if they think it’s not biased, they’re idiots.
Wouldn’t identification as being on a side be itself a matter of opinion? I think we’d be better off moving the unprejudiced mind bit (at least, to the extent it’s possible to have one) back a step.
Are you claiming that there’s no such thing as objective reality?
When an organization is composed of known, admitted liars, “biased” is only the beginning of why they shouldn’t be taken seriously. Fox isn’t regarded as a real, credible news source outside of America anymore than Pravda was taken seriously in America. Someone who buys the propaganda and lies of Fox should be regarded as being just as much of a fool as would someone who bought into Pravda’s propaganda and lies.
My mother watches an awful lot of Faux News and it bugs the crap out of me. Especially when she starts spouting the bullshit.
Fortunately, my father can’t stand it, so when they’re together, I know she doesn’t watch it.
The promising sign was when I stopped by my sister’s house (where my mother nannies their kids) and she was watching Faux News the other day. The “reporter” kept going after the guy she was interviewing because he kept blowing off her hysteria about Recess Appointments. Finally, I turned to my mother and said “This is exactly why I don’t like this channel. He’s making a perfectly valid point; that being that every President has to make Recess Appointments to get the jobs filled, it is a fact of life in Washington. And our last President made the largest number of any recent President. But she’s making it out like this is something new that Obama is doing to hurt the country.”
My mother agreed and changed the channel. I was proud of her.
I agree with that. I do hope that at least some source , even with its bias, at least has some integrity when it comes to telling the truth and presenting facts. I’m glad to listen to an honest informed conservative or moderate conservative argument. I welcome it. The problem I have with Fox is that so much of it is so biased with little regard for honesty. It’s feakin hard to take.
I think the bigger issue is what people consider “news”. Very little of what you see on FOX or MSNBC is hard news. Most of it is editorializing. FOX’s editorializing leans right, MSNBC’s leans left. The only real news show on FOX is Shepard Smith, and he’s actually pretty good. I don’t even know what the hard news show is on MSNBC. You have Mattews-Ed-Matthews-Olberman-Maddow from 2-6PM every day. None of those is a news show.
So, when someone says he gets most of his news from FOX, it’s more likely that he means O’Reilly or Hannity, and not Smith. If he said he did mean Smith, I’d think differently about him than if he meant the other two. But I think that would be a rare person…
Bias exists. It can be objectively identified. And anyone paying attention should be aware that Fox News presents opinion and occasionally news from a right-wing perspective. If a person denies this, and believes that Fox News (as a channel, including both news and opinion) is non-biased, we may reliably conclude that this person:
Of course the flip side of this coin is also true. If you tell them you rely on MSNBC and/or the remaining alphabet networks - don’t worry, they’ll dismiss your opinion as wildly biased as well.
:dubious: And if you ask the same questions from someone on the ‘right’ and someone on the ‘left’ in the UK? In France? Japan? Outer Mongolia?
And yet you aren’t ‘fair and balanced’ on every subject…certainly not from MY perspective. So, if I were to judge you based solely on your views on one thing, would that be representative of your views on everything?
But see, you are adding in distinctions that weren’t in the OP. The OP is asking “Is it ok to dismiss someone for watching FOX?”. So, while you make exceptions for someone religious (cleverly seeing where I was going with that one), you aren’t really making the same distinctions here.
I watch Family Guy and the Simpsons. Are you going to dismiss me?
Note to OP: Fox != Fox News. They are separate channels (yes owned by the same company, but we are talking about Fox News here)
There have also been studies that show that people who get their news from Fox are much more likely to believe things that are objectively false. For example, a large percentage of Fox News viewers believed that we found WMDs in Iraq.
It would be most interesting to hear what Der Trihs considers a “real News” outlet…
IMHO, anyone placing themselves in lock-step with any one “news” source is leaving themselves open as accepting opinion, or biased news, as fact.
None of the major networks can claim to be free to tarnished, or outright fabricated, “news” They should all come with a viewer beware disclaimer.
My best advice is taking bits and pieces from a variety of sources and maybe you’ll be able to average out the truth somewhere along the line.
I don’t understand your question. We’re talking about “left and right” as they are popularly understood in the US, and there really isn’t a lot of ambiguity or confusion about it, especially if you break it don into very specifuc issues. For instance, how many people did Fox put on to advocate for health care reform, and how many people against it, and how much time did each person get. That’s measurable.
I’ve never claimed to be fair and balanced. Anyone who claimed to believe my posts are unbiased I would say hasn’t understood them very well.
I also never said you could tell everything about a person by one view, but you can get a gauge of their critical thinking skills if they say something patently goofy or uninformed. If someone claims to be a 9/11 Truther, for instance, it is safe to adjust one’s expectations for that person accordingly.
No, the OP said someone claims that Fox News is “balanced” or "objective, he “will give little or no credence to whatever they say on certain issues,” and asked about the reasonableness of that.
Did you even read the OP, or just the thread title?