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News :: Media : Right Wing |
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NEW FAIR STUDY: Still Failing the "Fair and Balanced" Test: Fox's Special Report Leans Right, White, Republican & Male |
Current rating: 0 |
by FAIR
(No verified email address) |
14 Jul 2004
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In one-on-one interviews, conservatives accounted for 72 percent of ideological guests, and Republicans outnumbered Democrats five to one. And, according to the study, Special Report rarely features women or non-white guests in these prominent newsmaker interview spots: 83 percent of guests were white males. |
NEW YORK - July 13 - Though Fox News Channel wraps itself in slogans of journalistic evenhandedness, FAIR's latest study of Fox's Special Report with Brit Hume finds the network's flagship news show still listing sharply right. In one-on-one interviews, conservatives accounted for 72 percent of ideological guests, and Republicans outnumbered Democrats five to one. And, according to the study, Special Report rarely features women or non-white guests in these prominent newsmaker interview spots: 83 percent of guests were white males.
The study, featured in the August issue of Extra!, was commissioned by filmmaker Robert Greenwald for the film Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism. The film will screen across the country on Sunday, July 18 at house parties organized by MoveOn.org; you can find the screening nearest you at http://action.moveon.org/outfoxed/.
FAIR's current study looked at 25 weeks of Special Report's one-on-one interview segments including 101 guests. Results were compared to those from 2001 and 2002 FAIR studies of Special Report.
* Conservatives outnumbered progressives by more than five to one. Fifty seven percent of Special Report's guests were ideological conservatives; 12 percent were centrists, and 11 percent were progressives (while 20 percent were non-ideological). Among ideological guests, conservatives accounted for 72 percent. This marks an increase in left-of-center guests since 2002, when a mere three percent were left of center-but also an increase in conservatives, up from 48 percent.
* Republicans outnumbered Democrats by five to one (35 to 7). Furthermore, of the handful of Democrats that did appear, the majority were centrist or conservative. Only one of the 35 Republicans, on the other hand, was centrist, and none were progressive. The five-to-one imbalance is a marked regression from the 2002 study, when Republicans outnumbered Democrats by only three to two.
* Women and people of color continue to be scarce. Only 7 percent of guests were women, and only 11 percent were people of color. Only one woman of color was featured in a one-on-one interview: National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. And the female and non-white guests were remarkably conservative; no progressive women and only one progressive person of color appeared.
If Fox is the "fair & balanced" network it claims to be, then the guest list of what Fox calls its "signature news show" ought to reflect a diverse spectrum of ideas and sources. In FAIR's second study of Special Report in 2002, the show had slightly moderated the imbalance with regard to Republican and conservative guests found in our 2001 study. But with current findings indicating that the show has tipped back toward increased imbalance, it becomes harder to defend Special Report from charges that it chooses its guests based on political sympathies, not news judgment.
"Fox is depriving its viewers of real debate and some important and dissenting views," said FAIR's Steve Rendall, co-author of the study.
The complete report can be accessed online at: http://www.fair.org/extra/0407/special-report.html.
For more information on Outfoxed, visit http://www.outfoxed.org. |
See also:
http://www.fair.org
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Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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Fox News: The 'Official' Government News Network |
by James O. Goldsborough
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
15 Jul 2004
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In Europe, I discovered during my many years abroad, governments mostly controlled television. Citizens were fed a steady diet of official information through government-owned or dominated channels.
During those years, I learned to appreciate America's media freedom. When that freedom is under attack, as it frequently is, I've known which side to take.
A few years ago, Newt Gingrich and his band of Republican ideologues opened fire on the Public Broadcasting Service, accusing it of bias and threatening to withdraw public funding from it. In short, they wanted it to be like the European systems I'd known β official voices of the state.
The public outcry was so severe that Gingrich backed down with barely a whimper. A private citizen now, he calls his attack on PBS a mistake.
In 1996, Fox News was invented by an expatriate news mogul named Rupert Murdoch. I'd seen what Murdoch did to the British newspapers he bought, moving them somewhere to the right of the queen, and saw what he did to The New York Post, which became a staunch Gingrich supporter.
But what would Murdoch do with a national U.S. cable news network?
Eight years later, we have the answer: He has made Fox News the official Bush network, an extension of the White House press office.
Murdoch has made money with his formula, laughing all the way to the bank. But it's not news he purveys, it is propaganda. America doesn't need a European-style government network because we have Murdoch and Fox.
Fox News is under attack.
A new study by the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, or FAIR, documents how Fox's main news show lists so far to the political right that it rarely even invites women or nonwhite guests to its program. To Fox's claim that its rightward tilt counterbalances a leftward tilt of other media, FAIR states:
"Previous FAIR studies have found that, across the supposedly 'liberal' media, Republican sources dominate β and Fox simply skews even farther to the right."
This week, FAIR's jabs at Fox are overshadowed by some haymakers apparently landed in a new documentary film by Robert Greenwald called "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism." The film, partly funded by a liberal political group called Center for American Progress, includes interviews with former Fox employees and internal memos showing how Fox distorts news coverage to conform to owner Murdoch's views.
"Outfoxed," which comes out on DVD this week and which I have not seen, is extensively reviewed in this week's national press. The Los Angeles Times, for example, reports that former CIA officer Larry Johnson states he was dropped by the network as an analyst after criticizing the Bush administration. The New York Times prints memos from the film from a Fox News executive instructing employees how to report on the Iraq war.
Last fall, I reported a study done by a University of Maryland research group documenting how Fox viewers held more "misperceptions" about the Iraq war than people who obtained their news from any other source.
Using a sample of 3,334 respondents, Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes asked three questions: (1) Do you believe evidence was found linking Iraq to Sept. 11? (2) Do you believe weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq? (3) Do you believe most world opinion supported the war?
Fox viewers held more of these misperceptions (80 percent) than viewers of network news (average 62 percent), nearly twice as many as readers of newspapers and four times as many as people who relied on PBS/NPR.
Ironically, not even all the government-owned media networks in Europe skew the news as much as the privately owned Fox. In Britain, the BBC, for example, has a self-governing charter that protects it from the kind of government interference Gingrich and friends sought for PBS.
The BBC led the way last year in investigating the Blair government's actions leading up to the Iraq war, and though criticized in the Hutton report for being overzealous in its criticisms, its charter was not changed or weakened. Murdoch newspapers led the charge to weaken the BBC.
Most European nations β with the exception of former Soviet ones β are moving away from official news. In America, however, Murdoch, who has many friends in Washington and is extending his news empire by expanding his cable and satellite ownership, provides viewers with an official Republican channel.
It may be successful and it may be patriotic, but it is not news. You don't have to watch it very long to realize that these people are peddling propaganda, opinion dressed up as fact. They have invented a clever motto β "fair and balanced" β to distract viewers from the reality of their Orwellian doublethink, defined as keeping the contradiction in mind as one says the opposite.
Fox News eliminates the need for thinking, reducing complex issues to the simple right-wing orthodoxy Murdoch has discovered as his formula for making money. It represents a stark break with American news traditions.
Β© Copyright 2004 Union-Tribune Publishing Co
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