That’s my point as well. I don’t ever see any “blatant propaganda” on Fox or any other news outlet. If anyone has, please feel free to jump in.
Lots of folks denounce Fox news by mentioning a few commentators, O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. They don’t pretend to be “newsmen” – they are unabashedly conservative commentators.
Brit Hume’s show, on the other hand, regularly features a panel across the spectrum, and Hannity at least at Colmes to offset him.
What irritates me so much about CNN is its pretention that there is no other view or way to present the news.
Case in point: The dispute over the war in Iraq basically comes down to “neat” theory or “mess” theory (Harry Shearer mentioned this on his Le Show a few weeks ago). There are those who believe that things are basically neat, getting neater, with some serious loose ends, of course, but things are heading in the right direction. Go the Brookings Institute web site on Iraq, for example, and see the trends in electricty output, oil production, and the total picture one gets from many public opinion polls. Check out car sales, university attendance, size of Iraqi army and police forces, etc.
“Mess theory” holds that things are unravelling quickly. They focus on the “growing death toll”, say that things are “increasingly out of hand” and so forth. CNN, as far as I can tell, holds the left wing position of mess theory, but does not admit this is a position of the left, or have sufficient balance of people to report differently. It is not a overtly and piously left as NPR, but on this and evey political issue that I can gauge, it leans left.
Constantly refering to the "heroes’’ in Iraq certainly counts as propoganda in my book.
I mentioned once before, but I suspect that a large number of SDMB liberals object to the style of Fox news more than the content. With their strapping square-jawed anchors and bimboesque newswomen, muttering commentary under their breath, all while in front of a backdrop that looks like the decorations for a pre-homecoming pep ralley, I’m sure Fox news gives many a liberal flashbacks to high school and college where the football team or local fraternity pushed them in the mud, stole their Birkenstocks and shaved their Jesus hair.
I don’t have anything against Fox News per se, however IMHO the constant simplistic commentary by the Fox & friends gang, obviously designed to appeal to the Joe Middleamerica who’s never been more than 20 miles from their home town, comes across as ignorant in misinformed.
You are getting paid to sit there and look pretty while reading the Teleprompter. Stop flexing that community college intellect on the air.
As for the actual content, I think the networks are basically all the same. It’s not like Fox and CNN and MSNBC cover diferent stories. I just think Fox tends to focus more on the pretty explosions and tracer fire.
A vast majority of Americans view our soldiers as just that. My guess would be at eighty percent, plus. Fox understands this and is hoping to draw and hold viewers by expressing an idea that the viewer agrees with.
I avoid Fox and friends for this exact reason…and Fox is my network of choice for national news.
…whether or not it validates the ‘fair and balanced’ claim. Fair balanced reporting is rarely something that the majority will be comforted by.
First, to say that MRC leans to the right is an understatement. They are a right-wing media watchdog group. Their whole point is to search for supposed left-wing bias. They are not some sort of spinsanity.
And much of the MRC stuff is all cherry-picked and taken out of context. Al Franken has a great story about a time he was on a show with Goldberg and he asked Goldberg if he knew what happened on the day that a quote from MRC that Goldberg used in his book) by one of the news anchors about the Russian leaders came from. Goldberg didn’t know that it was the day of the Russian coup. The context of that changed the whole nature of the quote…If you don’t know that context, it sounds like it is left-leaning but if you do it doesn’t at all.
That it why it is best not to try to look at how they report the news looking for slight slants, like MRC does, but focus more on actual variances with the truth like FAIR, the left-wing media watchdog group, does. (I’ll note, by the way, that MRC apparently has a budget way, way bigger than FAIR and yet FAIR still seems to come up with better factual documentation of variances with the truth than MRC does.)
One example of this is how the media covered the events surrounding the inspectors leaving Iraq in 1998. Many incorrectly reported that the inspectors were “kicked out” by Saddam. And, even when they correctly stated that the inspectors were pulled out, they often mentioned Saddam’s interference with the inspections because he alleged that the inspectors were spying without bothering to note that these “allegation” had in fact been reported as fact in several major U.S. newspapers, citing U.S. and U.N. sources. (Actually, if you go to a recent Fresh Air interview with Hans Blix, he also mentions as fact that UNSCOM was being used by the U.S. to spy on Iraq.) Amusingly, even some of those very same newspapers who had reported this spying as fact back in 1999 reported it only as an allegation by a nutty dictator in late 2002 and early 2003, despite the fact that there had been no evidence brought to light that disputed the original reports (and, as I noted, reports that Blix himself corroborates).
Hell, even the supposedly left-leaning N.Y. Times has had to issue a mea culpa about its poor overly-credulous reporting leading up to the Iraq war:
They then go on to give some more specific examples.
Check - all mainstream US news sources appear to be varying shades of Right.
Right…And, this is particularly true when the beefs with the reporting center on issues of fact, not just on reporting viewpoints with the right balance matching public opinion.
Just to clarify, the beef is with how the media discussed these events 4 years later, during the lead-up to the current war, not how they covered them at the time that they occurred. In fact, the amusing thing is how the story changed between 1998 and 2002.
I find the idea of news stations only reporting on news they seem to think the target audience would like or prefer to hear as rather abhorrent. Do you think this is reasonable behaviour for a news station? If it is a non-factual programme, or a op-ed piece and listed as such, then fair enough. But to wilfully manipulate or discard reporting on agreed facts in order to appease a particular target audience is certainly not how I would like my news stations to behave.
Was this a general throw-away comment, or do you feel this is actually designed corporate practice to give Fox greater ratings and viewer approval?
Fox News: “Reporting only the news you want to hear!”
>Check - all mainstream US news sources appear to be varying shades of Right.
Well, this rightist says that US news sources appear to be varying shades of Left. No way to disprove me! Nyah!
You call that a mea culpa?
That’s the same cop-out the administration is using.
‘Oh poor us ! we were misled into this horrible war by an unscrupulous group of foreign agents.’
No, their reporting 't being misled by any exiles, it was misled by the administration.
They are still covering the lies that spew forth from the WH.
The word for this is propaganda, not news. That may be an accurate summary of a lot of what FOX does.
n. The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.
I remember when they first started using the term during the Iraq war. They did use it to describe the American guy who blew up his troop’s tent. The examples you gave are older than that. And frankly, they don’t use the term perfectly consistently. They often say suicide rather than homicide.
The fullest account is in Franken’s book, but here is a transcript of part of that interview on a blog.
They’re blatant neo-conservative cheerleaders. They lost me permanently when they started the “homicide bomber” BS. I had alot of hopes for the channel because I do feel that CNN had and has a liberal bias, and I consider myself a conservative with a libertarian bent. I watch MSNBC anymore.
Palestinian homicide bomber (Fox)
Googling homicide bombers, those are the first two entries at this time.
Okay…One could certainly make the argument that their apology doesn’t go far enough. But, for the purposes of this thread, my point was that a newpaper that is often cited as having a left-wing bias admits that it did a poor job in the lead-up to the Iraq war because it, for whatever reason, reported the Administration line on Iraq with insufficient investigation and questioning.
By the way, another piece of evidence in regards to Iraq was a polling study several months back (maybe someone who remembers it can dig up the cite?) showing how Americans tended to believe several factually inaccurate things in regards to Iraq. It may not have proven there is not a “liberal media” but it certainly demonstrated that if such a media existed it was spectacularly ineffective at countering the propaganda spewing forth from this Administration with any amount of factual reporting of the truth.
One of the interesting facts from that study was that when most people cited a TV / radio media as their major news source, there was essentially no correlation between how closely they claimed to follow the news and whether or not they were better informed (in the sense of not believing these falsities about Iraq). The exception was Fox News where the correlation was negative…i.e., if the person said Fox was their major media source, they were more likely to be misinformed if they said that they followed the news more closely than if they said that they followed it less closely. (Only people who used the print media as their major news source were more likely to be better informed if they followed the news more closely.)
That’s my take on it as well. I generally watch either Fox News or MSNBC for coverage (I don’t care for CNN for a variety of reasons). While I will agree that there probably is some conservative bias in how stories are reported, that in and of itself is not a bad thing as long as they are reporting factually. Personally, I can’t stand O’Reilly or Hannity and Colmes, and I don’t remember being too enamored with Gibson either, but it’s been a while since I watched it. For that matter, I think the only show of theirs that I like is Brit Hume’s, due to the panel discussion. I also like Fox News Sunday (not so much now that changed to that new guy from Hume) and find myself switching between it and Meet The Press depending on who’s on Meet The Press any given week, once again, mostly during the panel discussion.
Personally, it seems to me that most of the anti-Fox News speech is either against the columnists, which I don’t have a problem with, as I can name lots of columnists that I don’t like, both conservative and liberal, or against a perceived bias in the reporting and language used. Honestly, I don’t see that much of a bias, or at least no more than any other news agency has in any given direction.