Disclaimer: I am a liberal. This post will most likely contain bias.
The difference between me and Fox News? I don’t blatantly deny my bias.
The difference between me and Fox News? I don’t blatantly deny my bias.
Do you remember the “telephone game” from elementary school? The concept is simple: someone whispers some silly sentence to someone else, and by the time it gets back to where it started, it’s turned into even sillier nonsense that is no where near what the original thought was.
Now take this concept and expand it to a national (or even international) level. For example, the original story: Michelle Obama didn’t wear a headscarf in Saudi Arabia, since it is not required for foreigners to wear them; what gets thrown back at us: Michelle Obama is disrespectful of other cultures and hates Saudi Arabia.
This is how the media works–any form of media. They all have bias. The individual people who work for news corporations have their own views, and these views are often reflected in their work. Hence, news stories, especially those having to do with politics, will generally lean to a given side or way of thinking, and this varies with each media outlet. This is what happens when humans, who are prone to bias and error, run the media.
How does Fox News play into this? Simple–Fox News is a media outlet, so the corporation is not magically immune to this inevitable bias. In fact, many (including Seth Ackerman) have pegged Fox as one of the most biased media outlets, claiming that it leans strongly to the right. Quite frankly, this claim isn’t too far-fetched.
All I ask is that we stop giving Fox News some sense of purity. Nothing makes me more angry than seeing “Fair and Balanced” used to describe a news outlet, even if the slogan were used for a left-wing corporation, such as CNN or MSNBC.
So repeat after me: “Every news outlet has bias. Every news outlet, to some extent, leans to one side.” Ahh, thank you for helping to prevent my impending aneurysm.
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Comments from old blog:
Matthew: It’s definitely important to recognize the inevitable presence of bias in news outlets, or in any other communication of info by humans. Equally important, I would think, is avoiding the temptation to imply a false equivalence between various outlets in this regard, as many reasonable people do in an attempt to portray themselves as unbiased. All news is created imperfect, but no equally so.
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Comments from old blog:
Matthew: It’s definitely important to recognize the inevitable presence of bias in news outlets, or in any other communication of info by humans. Equally important, I would think, is avoiding the temptation to imply a false equivalence between various outlets in this regard, as many reasonable people do in an attempt to portray themselves as unbiased. All news is created imperfect, but no equally so.
You raise an interesting point, in that Fox News seems more committed than anyone else to telling their audience, quite explicitly, how fair and balanced and without spin their coverage is. Maybe this is part of their polarizing nature, and why Americans consistently consider them either the most or least trustworthy source of information. All I know is, I’ve never seen such declarations of “WE ARE NOT BEING BIASED” from so-called ‘serious’ broadcasters, like BBC, PBS, NPR, etc.
It is interesting to think of "fair and balanced" as a provocative slogan. It's sort of like yelling "I'm very calm and impartial!" in an angry and aggressive way. That Fox uses a statement of neutrality in such a way is, as Matthew notes, one of the unusual features of it. Does this mean that it is in fact biased and trying to hide it, as Sydney suggests? Does it mean that it requires aggressiveness to point out other people's bias, as Fox might claim in response? It is certainly true that Fox is a quite different news animal from the others in the pack, whatever that difference might mean.
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