The President and his staff have it right about Fox News. A study released by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds that 47% of Americans see Fox News as mostly conservative. None of the other news sources were found to be as overwhelmingly liberal or conservative, with MSNBC and NBC being seen as mostly liberal by 37% of Americans.
It looks like the American public understands what Fox is – a communications branch of the conservative Republican party.
h/t to Crooks and Liars
msnbc is more liberal than fox is conservative this report is crap sorta like the 3.5% the libs are talking about or the million jobs saved
Who gave this guy the internet?
Um…the phrase hoisted on their own petard comes to mind.
I doubt few people will be surprised by these results.
Sure. But in aggregate, they are certainly overwhelmingly liberal. For Every other network, at least twice as many people perceive them as being mostly liberal as mostly conservative. Add up all the blues. Then add up all the reds. Even if you were to take CBS and convert it to Fox News and it still wouldn’t be close.
Said another way, you have five networks that skew a little to moderately left and one network that skews hard right. It’s like a game of hoops with 1 Michael Jordan vs 5 Scotie Pippins. (Tells you how much I follow the NBA that that’s my analogy). You folks want to complain about Fox being a bullying 6th grader when the 5 4th graders are more than holding their own.
The other thing is that despite their “Fair & Balanced” tagline, everybody knows Fox leans hard right. Meanwhile the rest all pretend to be down the middle when they cleary tilt to the left. The bigest issue is just how pervasive bias has become in news and the blurring of news and opinion.
(Of course I just realized the only news/opinion I’ve watched on ANY of the channels for the last few years has been the Sunday morning politics shows…)
ABC, NBC, and CBS are only liberal when comparing them to Fox. MSNBC is liberal when compared to ABC,NBC, and CBS.
The news is never considered neutral and objective. When they show the support for the Iraq War, they are warhawks and mouthpieces for conservatves; when they show protesters, they are liberal peaceniks. If they only show news that cannot ever be considered left or right, they would not exist because of a lack of material to report on.
ABC, NBC, and CBS reflect society at large as they perceive the issues and news of the day.
btw- The phrase is ‘hoisted by his own petard’. A petard is a small bomb.
Or maybe Fox News is only liberal when compared to…ahh…can’t complete that sentence with a straight face 🙂
I don’t believe that. I think you can report the news objectively – and most of the networks do it most of the time. You can report “just the facts ma’am” it just doesn’t sell as well. I also happen to believe that journalists have (understandably) skewed left for a long time – but that they used to take very seriously the commitment to put personal bias aside. I don’t believe that commitment is nearly as strong as it used to be.
Here’s the petard part (that I misquoted). If you want to say that, if you want to use this study as evidence that Fox News is mostly conservative, then you have to accept the part of the results that also show that people who believe the other networks are mostly liberal outnumber those who believe they’re mostly conservative by more than 3 to 1.
Locke,
It is known that populous cities are, for the most part, liberal. National journalists appear to be based in large cities. Does B follow A that TV, radio, and print journalism reflect the metro areas in which the journalists live? I think so. And as a matter of fact, I am tired of NYC reporting with undue drama every weather event, scandal, and trend as if the rest of America cares about NYC.
Washington drinks its own Kool Aid to, IMO.