Fair & Balanced?

Listeners hear (mostly on the radio Fox News shows) the rationale for the existence of this media outlet repeated dozens if not hundreds of times each day. The rationale is given that the media in general is liberal and needs Fox News to be balanced. It is stated so often and challenged so rarely if ever, that the psychology of listeners is that it presumably is true. . . . but it is NOT! Especially the majority of radio shows on Fox News are the most outrageous, disrespectful and distorted diatribes of anything but news that you can find in the media anywhere, for 12 hours per day. It is absolutely insulting to every listener’s intelligence if they would listen more attentively. For more discussion on this, we refer you in this blog entry to the earlier blog entry whose title notes emphatically that CNN and Fox News are not comparable. We would only add here that the distortions of this “liberal media” characterization on some of the Fox News shows is disgusting. It is called the “drive-by media” and “socialist news outlets” and dozens of other epithets. Many of these outlets, CNN, the New York Times and Washington Post of course win national and international acclaim for their news, with Pulitzer prizes for their contributions. Ever hear of any Fox News hosts winning international acclaim?

            The motto Fair and Balanced lists two clear adjectives that should refer to Fox News only and not to any other media outlet. The Fox News presentations and content should themselves be fair and should be balanced. The motto does not communicate to anyone that they should essentially listen to other (presumably liberal) media outlets half the time and Fox News the other half of the time in order to have, on average, a fair and balanced set of inputs. The Fox News management know all too well that probably the majority of their listeners listen only to them as their sole source of “news”. We believe they should be ridden out of town for the horrible and disrespectful job they do of this day after day.  Even if the other media outlets were distorting and slanting news intentionally to promote liberal policies, if Fox News folks had a healthy concern for freedom and democracy, they should be pointing out how all the other outlets are distorting the news. Instead Fox News claims and thus implies that they themselves are the only one Fair and the only one Balanced.  We challenge them to get national and international independent critics to listen to the verbal content, the non-verbals, the stories covered and not covered, essentially all the categories listed on our Fox News Tracking Sheet and see how they stand up. (These tracking sheets of course can be used to track any other media outlet or channel. We are convinced that any level of negative or concerning content from any other outlet will be  tidal waved by the Fox News transgressions.)

            The classic example of Fox News distortion of news and coverage was apparent during the last presidential election campaign with Obama and McCain holding 3 televised debates. It was not officially published as a summary, but scanning all the cable channels that covered the debates, especially those who surveyed their viewers at the end of the debates as to who “won” each one, very discrepant numbers were found. Of all the non-Fox News channels that covered the debates and surveyed viewers (surely attracting both conservative and liberal and independent viewers widely among them), every single channel and survey, at every one of the 3 debates, showed Obama “won” with 55 to 60% of the opinions survey. In contrast, in every one of the debates surveyed by its viewers on Fox News, McCain won every one by 80 to 88% of the surveys cast. That is more than a 40% swing compared to every other media channel doing surveys. Does this suggest anything to you?

These debate surveys were not opinion polls on policy preferences. Does this sound like Fox News is serving any public service to “balance” the media coverage when their results are so distorted from every other channel? We suggest it is a disgrace to them . . . and to our political environment that they are tolerated in the mainstream media.