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Fox News

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The Fox News Channel (FNC) is a cable news channel owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Considered largely conservative in its projections and perceptions, it occasionally ventures into original news topics that are uncovered by other outlets. Fox is considered by many as a quasi-arm of the Republican party or at least the conservative movement.[citation needed]

Contents

History

FNC was launched in October 1996 and, according to Fox, as of August 2003 "has over 80 million subscribers throughout the United States. This number is up from 13 million subscribers at the time of the network's initial inception."[1]

"From the time of its launch until the present, FNC has been dedicated to presenting news in what it believes to be an unbiased fashion, eschewing ideological or political affiliation and allowing the viewer to reach his or her own conclusions about the news. FNC was created as a specific alternative to what its founders perceived as a liberal bias in the American media," FNC stated in its statement of claim against Al Franken and Penguin. (See below for more details on the legal suit.)

Since 1997, the statement said, FNC has spent $61 million "promoting and advertising its brand".

"FNC's balanced approach to reporting the news has become extremely popular and FNC is now the most watched twenty-four-hour news network in the nation. FNC regularly scores better ratings than do its chief competitors, MSNBC and CNN. Indeed, during the 2003 war in Iraq, FNC was the most watched cable news source for up-to-the-minute news," FNC stated.

"Fair and Balanced"

Fox News Channel promotes itself under the slogan "fair and balanced", but examinations of the channel's guest selection have found notable imbalances towards Republicans and conservatives. In 2001, media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting studied the guestlist of FNC's flagship news program, Special Report, it found that Republicans made up 89 percent of Fox News' partisan guests, outnumbering Democrats 50 to 6. Avowed conservatives made up 71 percent of guests.[2] When liberal guests do appear they are usually outnumbered by 2 to 3 to even 4 to one.[citation needed] The host usually frames the topic or introduction to the topic in an extreme conservative partisan manner.[citation needed] {examples needed) The very topics selected by Fox News show a desire to promote a conservative agenda: Fox has also a history of promoting the "Tea Party" rallies and correspondents have been filmed to lead crowds at these rallies in chants.[citation needed]

Of course, calling your network "fair and balanced" does not make you fair and balanced, as Media Matters and Newshounds have demonstrated through their analysis of bias at Fox.[citation needed]

Perceived relationship with Republicans

In late 2002, Fox News chairman Roger Ailes confirmed the allegation in Bob Woodward's book Bush at War that he had sent a note to Karl Rove in the Bush White House suggesting policies to be adopted in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Woodward described the note as advocating Bush take "the harshest measures possible" in order to maintain the support of the American public. Ailes said the note was not political advice but a message sent "as a human being and a citizen", and denied that he used the word "harsh" or "harshly".[3]

Ailes attributes criticism of the political slant of Fox News to envy at its success. "They hate the idea that there is a huge niche for fair and balanced news," Ailes said. "We're not programming to conservatives. We're just not eliminating their point of view," he told the New York Daily News.[4]

It has been reported that Rupert Murdoch has expressed some embarrassment about the extreme ideological bias of Fox News.[citation needed] This story was not reported by that FNC.

Fox News and the Obama Administration

A public feud between the Obama administration and Fox News began with former White House communications director Anita Dunn claiming that the news organization “often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party"(see October 11, 2009 interview on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” here: [5]). Public comments by top Obama officials continued throughout the month of October with White House senior adviser David Axelrod and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel criticizing Fox News as “not really news".[6]

The White House went so far as to post a “reality check” [7] on its website, refuting various claims made by Fox talk show host Glenn Beck regarding the failure to secure the 2016 Summer Olympics bid for Chicago. Similarly, a link to a truth-o-meter debunking even more Fox News false claims can be found at the bottom of the page.[8]

In a sign that relations between the White House and Fox News are thawing, President Obama granted an extended interview [9] to Fox senior White House correspondent Major Garrett, covering a broad range of topics on Special Report with Bret Baier on November 17, 2009.

Charlie Reina

An email sent to Jim Romenesko's for posting on the message board of the journalism training center, The Poynter Institute, by former Fox News producer Charlie Reina, described the Fox newsroom as being permeated by bias:

The roots of Fox News Channel's day-to-day on-air bias are actual and direct. They come in the form of an executive memo distributed electronically each morning, addressing what stories will be covered and, often, suggesting how they should be covered. To the newsroom personnel responsible for the channel's daytime programming, The Memo is the bible. If, on any given day, you notice that the Fox anchors seem to be trying to drive a particular point home, you can bet The Memo is behind it.
The Memo was born with the Bush administration, early in 2001, and, intentionally or not, has ensured that the administration's point of view consistently comes across on FNC. This year, of course, the war in Iraq became a constant subject of The Memo. But along with the obvious - information on who is where and what they'll be covering - there have been subtle hints as to the tone of the anchors' copy.
For instance, from the March 20th memo: "There is something utterly incomprehensible about Kofi Annan's remarks in which he allows that his thoughts are 'with the Iraqi people'. One could ask where those thoughts were during the 23 years Saddam Hussein was brutalizing those same Iraqis. Food for thought." Can there be any doubt that the memo was offering not only "food for thought", but a direction for the FNC writers and anchors to go? Especially after describing the U.N. Secretary General's remarks as "utterly incomprehensible"?
The sad truth is, such subtlety is often all it takes to send Fox's newsroom personnel into action - or inaction, as the case may be. One day this past spring, just after the U.S. invaded Iraq, The Memo warned us that anti-war protesters would be 'whining' about U.S. bombs killing Iraqi civilians, and suggested they could tell that to the families of American soldiers dying there. Editing copy that morning, I was not surprised when an eager young producer killed a correspondent's report on the day's fighting - simply because it included a brief shot of children in an Iraqi hospital.
These are not isolated incidents at Fox News Channel, where virtually no one of authority in the newsroom makes a move unmeasured against management's politics, actual or perceived. At the Fair and Balanced network, everyone knows management's point of view, and, in case they're not sure how to get it on air, The Memo is there to remind them. [10]

In a subsequent interview with Tim Greive at Salon, Reina expanded on his brief initial note to Romenesko and explained how the bias of Fox management permeated the newsroom.

Asked for further examples, Reina described a story he worked on. "It was, I would say, about three years ago. I was assigned to do a special on the environment, some issue involving pollution. When my boss and I talked as to what this thing was all about, what they were looking for, he said to me: 'You understand, you know, it's not going to come out the pro-environmental side.' And I said, 'It will come out however it comes out.' And he said, 'You can obviously give both sides, but just make sure that the pro-environmentalists don't get the last word,' he said." Reina declined to do the story.

Pressed for further examples, he told Grieve of one affecting coverage of the Middle East. "I'll give you another example from that memo. When the Palestinian suicide bombings started last year, shortly after they started, one of the memos came down and suggested, 'Wouldn't it be better if we used 'homicide bombing' because the word 'suicide' puts the focus on and memorializes the perpetrator rather than the victims?' OK, never mind the fact that any bombing that kills is a homicide bombing. What would you call a suicide bombing where the perpetrator isn't killed? An intended suicidal homicide bombing? It got ridiculous. It may be ridiculous, but if you watch Fox now, you'll frequently hear suicide bombings described as 'homicide bombings,' right? ," he said.

"I'll tell you, it's interesting. On that same day [that Fox management distributed a memo suggesting suicide bombings be called 'homicide bombings'], the White House had made the same suggestion -- well, the Bush administration, whether it was the White House or the Pentagon or whatever. That's the background to it. By the next day, enough people [at Fox] were saying, 'What about this?' So the next day's memo kind of reluctantly said, 'Well, you could use either one.' But by then, everyone -- and again, we're talking about young people who don't have any perspective on this; all they know is that you do what they're told -- they know what management's feeling about this is. So ... it's 'homicide bombings.' And that's the beginnings of a new P.C," he said.[11]

Matt Gross, who left Fox News in March 2001 after working as a web journalist and editor, wrote to Romenesko about Reina's note:

Let me just say that the right-wing bias was there in the newsroom, up-front and obvious, from the day a certain executive editor was sent down from the channel to bring us in line with their coverage. His first directive to us: Seek out stories that cater to angry, middle-aged white men who listen to talk radio and yell at their televisions. (Oh, how I'd love to stick quotation marks around what is nearly a direct quote.)
To me, FNC reporters' laziness was the worst part of the bias. It wasn't that they were toeing some political line (though of course they were; see the embarrassing series on property rights from 2000), it was that the facts of a story just didn't matter at all. The idea was to get those viewers out of their seats, screaming at the TV, the politicians, the liberals -- whoever -- simply by running a provocative story," he wrote in October 2003. [12].

Blackisting of reporters

In July 2004, an article by Alex Ben Block in TV Week revealed that FNC's media relations department has adopted the practice of blacklisting journalists critical of the network. Included on the blacklist are David Bauder, an AP TV reporter who offended FNC by writing on the departure of Paula Zahn to CNN.

Block quoted FNC's media minder, Irena Briganti, stating "Why we're not dealing with him is that he treated us completely unfairly ... He took a story when we were just doing our job, being a resource, and made (the Fox publicist) a part of the story."

Others on the blacklist include Mike James, the editor of TV news industry website NewsBlue (who called a FNC anchor a "bonehead") and Baltimore Sun reporter David Folkenflik, for reporting that Geraldo Rivera had claimed that he was at a battle in Afghanistan when he wasn't.

"You know, everyone tries to hold us accountable. The reporters should be held accountable for what they do. A lot of media relations people won't do that. Well, we do," FNC flack Robert Zimmerman told TV Week. [13]

Iraq War

A year-long study by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA)[14] reported that Americans who relied on the Fox News Channel for their coverage of the Iraq war were the most likely to believe misinformation about the war, whatever their political affiliation may be. Those mistaken facts, the study found, increased viewers' support for the war.

The study found that, in general, people who watched Fox News were, more than for other sources, convinced of several untrue propositions which were actively promoted by the Bush administration and the cheerleading media led by Fox, in rallying support for the invasion of Iraq:

(percentages are of all poll respondents, not just Fox watchers)

  • Fifty-seven percent believed the falsity that Iraq gave substantial support to Al-Qaida, or was directly involved in the September 11 attacks (48% after invasion).
  • Sixty-nine percent believed the falsity that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11 attacks.
  • Twenty-two percent believed the falsity that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. (Twenty-one percent believed that chem/bio weapons had actually been used against U.S. soldiers in Iraq during 2003)

In the composite analysis of the PIPA study, 80 percent of Fox News watchers had one of more of these misperceptions, in contrast to 71 percent for CBS and 27 percent who tuned to NPR/PBS.

As the Washington Post reported[15], "The fair and balanced folks at Fox, the survey concludes, were 'the news source whose viewers had the most misperceptions.' Eighty percent of Fox viewers believed at least one of these un-facts; 45 percent believed all three."

As AlterNet reported, "For each of the three misperceptions, the study found enormous differences between the viewers of Fox, who held the most misperceptions, and NPR/PBS, who held the fewest by far. Eighty percent of Fox viewers were found to hold at least one misperception, compared to 23 percent of NPR/PBS consumers. All the other media fell in between."[16]

The Project for Excellence in Journalism's "State of the News Media 2005" concluded that Fox was "the most one-sided of all major news outlets." On Iraq, 25 percent of 2,000 stories analyzed were negative and 20 percent were positive. "Fox News Channel was twice as likely to be positive than negative, while CNN and MSNBC were evenhanded." Also, "with the exception of Republicans who prefer Fox News," Americans don't seek out news sources that reinforce their beliefs.[17]

In 1998, a Fox station in Tampa, Florida fired investigative reporters Jane Akre and Steve Wilson over a dispute involving their reporting on the Monsanto company's marketing of genetically-engineered bovine growth hormone.[18]

Fox, however, has a thin skin when it come to criticism of its conservative news content:

  • In October 2003 the creator of The Simpsons, Matt Groening, revealed that Fox News had threatened to sue Fox Entertainment - which makes the show - over the satirical use of rolling ticker lines on the screen. "Pointless news crawls up 37 per cent... Do Democrats cause cancer? Find out at foxnews.com... Rupert Murdoch: Terrific dancer... Dow down 5,000 points... Study: 92 per cent of Democrats are gay... JFK posthumously joins Republican Party... Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple...," read the ticker on the program that sparked the threat. "Fox said they would sue the show and we called their bluff because we didn't think Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself. We got away with it.... But now Fox has a new rule that we can't do those little fake news crawls [tickers] on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking it's real news," Groening told National Public Radio. Fox denied that it threatened legal action. [19]
  • Fox has threatened legal action against the Faux News Channel, which sells a parody T-shirt that carries the logo, "Faux News: We Distort, You Comply."
There are hard cases and there are easy cases. This is an easy case in my view and wholly without merit, both factually and legally.... Parody is a form of artistic expression protected by the First Amendment and the keystone of parody is imitation.... It is ironic that a media company, which should be seeking to protect the First Amendment, is seeking to undermine it by claiming a monopoly on the phrase "Fair and Balanced." [21]

Trumpeting "the capture as ex post validation of the coalition's invasion. Since Sunday December 14, 2003, FNC has been almost one continuous Saddamathon with the now-famous footage of the latex-gloved frisker searching Saddam triumphantly showing on the channel almost every hour on the hour." [22]

Atheist bashing

FNC shows such as "Fox and Friends" very often discuss issues on church/state, atheists, atheism. What they usually dont' do ironically, is feature many atheist guests. Bill O'Reilly has stated that a humanist billboard that says, "No God, No problem", was filthy. The billboard was a fun loving/catchy slogan that was by no means whatsoever critical of religion and was just a general promotion of humanists and humanism.

Wikipedia edits

On August 16, 2007 the blog network web site http://wired.blog.com, on a page titled Most Shameful Wikipedia Spin Jobs, carried an item titled Fox removes smoking warning. Someone monitoring Wikipedia scanner, a tool that records the IP addresses of people performing Wikipedia edits, had found that someone at the Fox Channel had removed a warning on the dangers of smoking by Keith Olbermann and altered the context of the article "to make Olbermann appear as an opportunistic and crass."[23][24]

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