People v. (Fox) News Corp.

It depends on what the "breaking news" is. If it is breaking news that benefits Democrats or the president, well the news won't be so "breaking". If fact, Fox News is likely to almost completely ignore it. But if the "breaking news" is something that benefits the Republican Party like a pseudo scandal (e.g. IRS, Benghazi, etc.) well then it gets back to back coverage.

Which is most of the time. Most of the time, "breaking news" isn't happening.

I don't think you have been paying attention. Fox isn't liked because it tells lies, deceives, and is downright dishonest in its programming. That is why in academic survey after survey, Fox News viewers have been found to be the least well informed, even less well informed than people who watch no news at all. That is more than Moveon at work.

You like Fox because it strokes your ideology. It tells you what you want to hear. And if you think Fox is the only major broadcast news that "tilts" towards Republicans, well you need to get out more. I take it you have never watched CNBC or "Morning Joe" on MSNBC? The Joe in "Morning Joe" is Joe Scarborough a former right wing and very "conservative" Republican congressman. I find a "full range" of opinion aired on most networks, with the exception being Fox News. The "Morning Joe" program does air both sides of story even though Joe Scarborough is very Republican. NPR is also another great source of information. As I said earlier, NPR reports news the way news use to be reported in the US. I find it very refreshing.

I used to watch Fox News, party for my aunt when I visited her and party to see what they were up to. I don't watch Fox News, it's a waste of my time. Because I can never be sure of what is true and what isn't true with Fox. So why waste my time? There are many other more credible news sources. So I no longer waste my time with Fox News like NPR.

If that is so, then why does MSNBC carry conservative programming like "Morning Joe" with Republican and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough hosting the program? Further, unlike Fox News, I have never had any of the MSNBC hosts or any of their guests outright lie to me and attempt to deceive me. They have made mistakes for which they promptly apologize. I cannot say that for Fox News. Fox News, outside of Republican talk radio, is most objectionable. I don't like people who lie to or attempt to deceive me. So I don't watch Fox News.

 

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Lol, the funniest part of this is the multi-layered irony of a group like MoveOn pushing a petition that misrepresents itself as a legal case against FoxNews for dishonesty!

Brian Williams is only accountable to his own bosses.

 

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[consolidating]

 

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I've read several such studies and typically they all have the same flaw in that they pick survey questions that predominantly have a liberal slant to the facts (the truth is something liberals want to hear, but conservatives don't). This makes the results inevitable. One could easily choose pro-conservative questions that liberals would be more likely to get wrong instead.

 

Have you now? That's bullshit and I think you know it. That is the same excuse Republicans always give when confronted with a little reality. So if you are too be believed, academics don't know how to do surveys. Please do show one of those liberally slanted questions. That was the same excuse Republicans and Fox News used when polls showed Romney loosing in 2012. They argued as you have done, the polls were skewed to favor Obama/liberals

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Well we can see how that worked out. The polls weren't skewed. The polls were correct. And the repeated surveys finding Fox News viewers are the least informed are just as accurate and true as the 2012 presidential polling.

Your response is a classic Republican response to facts Republicans don't like. You are not alone, Democrats do it too (e.g. Iceaura). But Republicans really excel at it.

 

Yes.

This study lists both:
http://www.sciforums.com/threads/people-v-fox-news-corp.144744/page-3#post-3273892
Examples of questions liberals have a political preference toward the right answer:
-The American economy is getting worse (in 2010)
-The stimulus legislation did not include tax cuts.

Examples of questions conservatives have a political preference toward the right answer:
-When TARP was voted on, Democrats did not mostly favor it.
-Obama has not increase troop levels in Afghanistan.

People who don't know what the right answer is are more likely to answer the conservative slanted questions correctly if they are conservative and the liberal slanted questions correctly if they are liberal.

This also means that on liberal-slanted true news, highly liberal biased sources such as MSNBC cause viewers to have the most correct answers and on conservative-slanted stories, conservative biases sources tend to have the most correct answers. So you get the odd dichotomy that FoxNews and MSNBC produce both the most misinformed on some issues and the most informed on others. For example, the least misinformed on these issues:

-The bank bailout legislation (TARP) was passed and signed into law under Pres. Obama: MSNBC, 38%
-It was proven that the US Chamber of Commerce was spending foreign money to back Republicans: Fox News, 23%

 

Where is the survey in which these questions were asked? I take it these were true and false, because they are just statements and not questions. Additionally, I don’t find those statements skewing one way or the other; they are simple true or false statements and can be objectively quantified. There is nothing subjective in either statement.

So basically, you are saying liberals are better informed on economic questions than Republicans are.

Again, in what survey were these true/false statements used? Two, the answers to those statements are very straight forward and quantifiable. Do you have any evidence Republicans would score more correctly on those statements than Democrats?

And this is what happens when you play the tribal card. Do you have any evidence the questions were inappropriate or vague? The point of the survey is not to make Republicans look better. And everything that doesn’t make the Republican Party look good isn’t liberal. Republicans can do that very well all on their own. You have no evidence these surveys were skewed.

The world isn’t Republican or Democrat. The truth isn’t Republican or Democrat. Facts are not Republican or Democrat, they are what they are. This Republican practice of branding reality as liberal and ignoring it has been to the detriment of the Republican Party. And it has bit the party in the derriere on multiple occasions. You haven’t proven the surveys were skewed.

If you are to be believed, academics don’t know how to conduct surveys. And I don’t think that is the case and you certainly haven’t proven otherwise.

 

So your claim is that they choose questions which, when answered correctly, are something liberals want to hear, rather than something conservatives want to hear - and that if the questions were ones that conservatives would want to hear the correct answer to, the odds would tilt in favor of FOX being more accurate. Let's see if that holds up. From the Farleigh Dickinson survey:

"A large group of protestors has been camped out on Wall Street for the last couple of weeks. To the best of your knowledge, are these protestors mostly Republicans or Democrats?" - Given that the OWS group was regularly attacked by FOX News for being criminals, clueless etc it would clearly make Republicans feel good to think that they were all Democrats - which they largely were. Yet FOX News watchers got this wrong more often than viewers of other networks. 63% of NPR viewers believed them to be mostly Democrats, vs. 46% of FOX viewers.

"Right now, which candidate seems to be leading in the polls for Republican Presidential nomination in 2012?" - Surely this is something Republicans want to hear, and presumably they want to hear the right answer. Yet again, FOX loses out to sources like MSNBC; 10% more MSNBC viewers knew that Romney was leading in the polls.

So even when the questions are chosen to give responses that Republicans want to hear, FOX viewers are more misinformed.

 

That is an odd one, and I can't explain it, but for whatever reason both Fox and MSNBC produced almost exactly the same wrong percentage. Yes, I would have expected that to be one that more MSNBC viewers would have gotten right. That's an outlier -- most of the others are much easier to identify the impact of the bias.

I think you misunderstood: The bias in the questions is such that the bias pushes them toward a particular answer, not that their bias makes them want to know the answer.

 

You said above "they pick survey questions that predominantly have a liberal slant to the facts (the truth is something liberals want to hear, but conservatives don't)" (And presumably vice versa.) If that is the case, surely the name of the leading Republican candidate is something that conservatives want to hear. And there is no way one could interpret "who is leading in the polls for the Republican nomination" as a question having a liberal slant.

 

You misunderstood. I explained it several times in different ways, so I don't know how. [shrug] Correct your understanding and move on, rather than trying to argue with me about what I meant.

No, people most want to hear the name of their favored candidate.

I didn't claim it did: you brought that question up.

 

Really? Let's see 'em.

This, posted above, doesn't qualify:

because it has no clear right answer. The survey people erred.

I know they are academics, and therefore according to some don't make mistakes when designing surveys, but in the real world it's reasonable to believe that the evidence demonstrates beyond any realistic doubt USCC use of its general fund and other such money, including at a minimum the foreign money that was pooled in the general fund, for Republican candidate campaign support. And that is what is normally meant by "proven" - an overwhelming preponderance of evidence, none of it contradicted. I don't know if that's what the respondents were going by, but it's possible - that question does not reliably reveal misinformation, regardless of the response.

And this is interesting:

because it is a very easy question that no one but a "conservative" influenced respondent would miss. The low percentage of MSNBC viewers getting that one right is evidence that these viewers are strongly influenced by "conservative" sources of some kind - there are no other sources of that error.

Now I'm a "Democrat", and that is somehow equivalent to being a "liberal"? You're headed south.

No, I don't "do it too".

Going way out of one's way to make false attributions of all bad features or symptoms to both sides of an imaginary division, especially one in which "Democrat" is equated with "liberal" or "Left", is a characteristic of the current Fox-addled mass media, btw. It's a symptom.

 

The way I would change things is to require the political bias in news media, to be considered a campaign donation charged as minutes of free advertising) subject to the rules of campaign funding. Both sides have their propaganda wings, with the liberals propaganda wings far more wide spread and diverse. There are campaign funding limits which would force all to be more objective to the News.

For example, Nixon had to resign due to wire tapping the democrats. Back then the republicans has to use old fashion bugs that are primitive by modern standards. This was important to democratic media with them helping to impeach Nixon. Today federal agencies, under President Obama wire tap all types of people, including journalists who stray and this is not considered news by the same news agencies at the same level as Nixon even though the occurrences are 1000 fold more.

Nixon suggested using the IRS against his opponents, but he never did this. Obama was the first president to do this, with nobody still accountable at the IRS. The only source of news was FOX with the liberal media not pushing the issue. Nobody has gone to jail, because the democrats fear they will plea bargain and offer a bigger fish all the way to the top. This is giant corruption compared to what Nixon did and was impeached for, yet no liberal news agency will put any effort into this. Why is bigger corruption ignored?

A current new story is about Obama's friend Al Sharpton, who visits the president often. He owes $4.5 million in back taxes. He never pays his taxes. The wealthy are supposed to pay their share, right? Yet he is not being investigated by the IRS or the Attorney General. Still, he has free access to President Obama, who calls off the dogs. This smells of corruption. Isn't this big news? The IRS goes after Tea Party who don't even own back taxes, and this injustice is ignored by the liberal media.

One explanation is the quality of modern journalists is very low due to too many media outlets. The talent pool is very dilute and weak, so real journalism, to address stories like Sharpton and IRS scandals, may be above their ability. FOX as the most money and tends to get the best of he best and can report this. The liberals gets the left overs, due to weak market share. These need to be told what to write and all do the same thing.

If this was counted as a campaign contribution, this would need to be limited and it might force news agencies to hire more competent people.

 

Al Sharpton has both federal and state liens against him for back taxes, so it is being taken care of, no corruption here.

 

Sharpton has always been an race baiter. That is his claim to fame. That is how he makes his money. He reminds me of Newt Gingrich. Sharpton makes his money playing a sector of the liberal base. Newt makes his by playing a sector of the so called conservative base. But few people outside their niche take them seriously.

 

There is no equivalence. Sharpton is a media figure and sometime local community spokesman, who gets paid for a minor role in drawing a niche audience for advertisements to a couple of media outlets. Newt Gingrich is a political power and intellectual consultant on the national stage, the major architect of the current Republican Congress and the propaganda operations of its corporate backing, the major force in the impeachment of an American President, and a sometime legitimate candidate for the Presidency himself. Gingrich gets paid to deliver political support for the reliable representatives of a corporate agenda in the Federal government.

Gingrich is centrally connected to corporate influence on Federal political power. Sharpton is marginally connected to media talk show entertainment. How does that translate into comparison as equivalent?

Rule of thumb: nothing derived from a "both sides" perspective is reasonable, or reality based. There are no such sides.

 

LOL

Anyone who wastes their time watching TV gets what they deserve.

 

Oh yeah, marginally connected! He hosts the show and show bears his name, "Politics Nation with Al Sharpton".

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Oh, yeah marginally connected.

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http://www.msnbc.com/politicsnation

 

The rest of us do not deserve what we get from the people who watch TV for their news.

Is that what you are claiming is equivalent to the influence and role of Newt Gingrich?

Maybe that's why you think CNN has no political bias - you see it as half way between Gingrich and Sharpton.

 

I suggest you go back and reread if there is still any ambiguity in your mind. And what does CNN have to do with your claim Sharpton is "marginally connected" to the program which bears his name?

CNN's bias is towards sensationalism (e.g. Swift Boating). Unlike Fox, CNN completely reported the story, but 90% or better was devoted to the more sensational aspects of the fictitious political stunt. CNN will sensationalized anything it can make a buck at be it beneficial to Republicans or Democrats.