Much Ado About Fox

December 19, 2011 Leave a comment

This past Thanksgiving, giddy media liberals parroted the fallacious conclusions of a Farleigh Dickinson University study.  Daily Kos crowed: “New public study: Watching Fox News makes you dumber.”  But it’s clear the poll was rigged merely to be smear fodder against America’s most viewed news channel.

The FDU researchers titled their press release “Some News Leaves People Knowing Less.”  In their misleading parlance, a news source (mostly Fox) “leads,” “leaves,” and “makes” the study participant dumber or less knowledgeable.  The language gives the impression that some active force shapes news consumers’ responses.  From this, one might conclude that Sean Hannity and Megyn Kelly emit brain cell-killing radiation when they appear on screen.  But this is not some lab rat experiment with tightly-controlled variables. The researchers stacked the deck against Fox from the onset.

Consider how the study collects data from its telephone respondents.  If one receives any news information from a given source over the past week, his responses count in favor of or against that source.  Now Fox News is a 24/7 telvision operation.  Any channel-surfing couch potato can tune into five minutes of “Fox and Friends” and per the pollster instructions report they got some news from Fox.  Meanwhile, NPR’s reporting, restricted to the commute hours and the less accessable radio format, is shield against association with casual news consumers.  Such people might even tune in during jazz hour and correctly report they had received no news from NPR.

Media Partition in the Age of Obama

Media Partition in the Age of Obama

On top of this selection bias, the FDU researchers share a liberal outlook with their favored media outlets.  As can be seen from the wording in poll question two, they place a premium on foreign news over domestic happenings.  Mainstream media like TIME and NPR devote inordinate amounts of time fawning over the “Arab Spring,” but conservative-friendly media like Fox tend to dispense with the rose-colored glasses.  Their viewers, having a vague awareness of continuing Egyptian upheaval, are not marinated in the feel-good pieces that liberal journalists keep producing.  This disadvantage magnifies when the pollsters fail to mention Mubarak by name in asking whether his regime was toppled.  For all we know, they are asking about the military transitional council!

Then, when the questions roll on to domestic news, the poll fumbles by asking who is the Republican front runner.  This is an especially murky proposition given the fluid nature of the field.  The results vary depending on when and by who the poll was taken.

All told, FDU stacked the deck against Fox, and packaged their study results a little too neatly for Kos, Arianna, and the rest of their progressive news friends.

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Truth, Justice and the American Weigh

April 27, 2010 Leave a comment

A spike in news reporting on the Tea Party movement came with the passing of tax day earlier this month.  Orbiting around this media meme of course were various references to talk radio and certain polarizing cable news channels.  Time and again my attention returned to the contentious issue of media bias.  There is so little that can be widely agreed upon as a basis of conversation.  Does media bias even exist?  Is it desirable or to be avoided?

NPR’s All Things Considered ran a story last Friday featuring perspectives on three news organizations in Atlanta.  It was refreshing to hear mainstream media report with some candor on the nature of news gathering itself.  I found myself in basic agreement with the proprietor of the Atlanta Progressive News as he identified the corporate bias of big media, characterized reporters’ single-handed attempts to be the “arbiter” of truth as “arrogant,” and asserted that trust can only be built if news gatherers admit their biases.  This all stands in contrast with traditional notions of down-the-line objectivity that such a mainstream media staple as CNN, which Politico recently reported on, attempt to maintain.  But if the news business resembles anything like a marketplace of ideas, the old “dinosaur” media as Hugh Hewitt calls them are finally succumbing to leaner, meaner, and wholly worthy competition.

Why should we welcome the likes of FOX News, talk radio, devolved blogs, and the host of other aggressively biased reporters and commentators?  Contrary to late, platitudinous naysaying that the climate of our national dialog has taken a marked turn toward the uncivil, America has thrived under a long and continuous tradition of rancorously competitive news reporting.  Ad hominem slanders that would put current reporting flaps to shame were the staple of the nation’s earliest newspapers.  For decades, papers openly supporting one party or the other competed for readership in the cities they shared.  The conscious cultivation of the objective, altruistic “Voice of God” was something of an artifact of the twentieth century.  In the popular imagination, this was best exemplified by the earnest, selfless comic book superhero-reporters Clark Kent and Peter Parker.  As commendable as these paragons of integrity have been, they betray an all-too-simplistic popular culture conception of the relationship between news gathering, facts, and the truth.  If only real-life villains were always rich men and military brass with a penchant for violently vibrant spandex outfits!  This leaves no mention of scientists, the other revered revealers of truth, which will have to follow up in another entry.

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