Fox News - the most trusted name in truthiness

Most Americans -- 61% -- do not believe in Darwin's theory of evolution [1]. In July 2009, an astonishing 58% of Republicans were not sure/doubted Obama was born in the United States [2].  In February 2002, a full 57% of Americans believed Iraq was directly involved in the Sept. 11 attacks or gave "substantial support" to al-Qaeda, 22% believed WMD had been found in Iraq, and 56% believed world opinion favored the Iraq war or was divided evenly -- all of which was demonstrably false at the time [3].

So perhaps it should not be too surprising that Glenn Beck is America's second most beloved TV personality (next to Oprah Winfrey) and that 49% of Americans say they trust Fox News -- a better score than any other TV news channel.  Politico reports:

“A generation ago you would have expected Americans to place their trust in the most neutral and unbiased conveyors of news,” said PPP President Dean Debnam in his analysis of the poll. “But the media landscape has really changed, and now they’re turning more toward the outlets that tell them what they want to hear.” 

This conclusion is backed up by a breakdown of the poll:  74% of Republicans said they trust Fox News, while only 30% of Democrats said they did. 

The thing about Fox News is that it has a severe case of all the usual TV news biases, plus a very strong ideological bias.  In recent years, MSNBC has tried to mimic the success of FN by becoming its leftist alter-ego.  But Fox News still stands out by the way its coverage distorts the facts and misinforms its viewers, in the service of its conservative ideology.  It even misinforms its viewers of the fact that it has an ideological bent.

An NBC poll found that whereas half the general public was misinformed, the overwhelming majority of Fox News viewers were misinformed about the proposed health insurance legislation:

In our poll, 72% of self-identified FOX News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79% of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69% think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75% believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly.

All of these perceptions are demonstrably false, as shown by nonpartisan fact-checking groups.  (The proposed health insurance legislation would not cover illegal immigrants, it would not lead to "a government takeover of health care" or taxpayer subsidies for abortion, and Sarah Palin's fantasy about death panels was Politifact.com's "lie of the year".  Congratulations on your award, Sarah.  No wonder Fox News hired you.)

You might think the NBC poll is untrustworthy.  Fair enough.  Let's go back to the original poll which found Fox News to be the most trusted network.  Here's what that polling organization had to say:

Denham said he had first-hand experience of Fox News's value judgments.

His firm had conducted a poll that produced some strikingly poor results for the Democrats in terms of their popularity ratings. At exactly the same time Fox News commissioned its own internal poll, which came up with more favourable results for the Democrats, yet the network decided to go with PPP's results rather than its own.

"That showed me that when they have the opportunity to go with something more negative about the Democrats, they will."

A 2003 study from the U. of Maryland found that Fox News viewers were most likely to have factually untrue beliefs which were crucial to their support of the Iraq war.  Here is just one example from the study [3]:

The extent of Americans’ misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news. Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions....—and were more than twice as likely than the next nearest network to hold all three misperceptions.

...

When asked whether the US has found “clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al-Qaeda terrorist organization,” among the combined sample for the three-month period 49% said that such evidence had been found. This misperception was substantially higher among those who get their news primarily from Fox—67%. Once again the NPR-PBS audience was the lowest at 16%.

The Columbia Journalism Review (which has been critical of liberal bias in the mainstream media), reports:

The [leaked, internal] memo informed Fox news employees to “be on the lookout for any statements from the Iraqi insurgents, who must be thrilled at the prospect of a Dem controlled Congress,” and “just because Dems won, the war on terror isn’t over.”

The CJR also reported the "fourth-grade-style doctoring of pictures" of NYT employees to make them look ugly, and misleading coverage designed to implicate al-Qaeda or illegal immigrants in the California wildfires on "Fox and Friends".

The fact that Fox News has a pro-Republican ideology and misleads its viewers should not be surprising.  After all, Rupert Murdoch has said openly that he used his media empire to try to influence public opinion in favor of the Iraq war.  That doesn't sound like "We report, you decide" to me.  And keep in mind, this is a guy who made his fortune peddling vulgar tabloids. 

Roger Ailes, founder and president of Fox News, worked for decades as media consultant for Republican campaigns, including the Nixon, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Guliani campaigns.  He also produced Rush Limbaugh's short-lived TV show.  Progressive media watchdog FAIR reports [4]: 

Described by fellow Bush aide Lee Atwater as having "two speeds--attack and destroy," Ailes once jocularly told a Time reporter (8/22/88): "The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it." Later, ... he was fond of calling Bill Clinton the "hippie president" and lashing out at "liberal bigots" (Washington Times, 5/11/93).

Here is what one Murdoch family member said recently about Fox News president Roger Ailes [5]:

Earlier this month the PR executive Matthew Freud, who is married to Rupert Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth, told the New York Times he was "ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes's horrendous and sustained disregard of journalistic standards".

Tony Snow, Neil Cavuto, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Brit Hume, Mort Kondrake, Fred Barnes, John Gibson, Laura Ingram -- almost all the Fox News mainstays have worked for the Republican party or were contributors to conservative publications.  The "liberal" commentators on FN are often, in fact, quite conservative or moderate.  FAIR goes into great detail on this and I challenge anyone to dispute its facts [4].  FAIR has done quantitative studies of Fox News' ideological bias, and here is just a taste [6]:

Of the 56 partisan guests on Special Report between January and May, 50 were Republicans and six were Democrats -- a greater than 8 to 1 imbalance. In other words, 89 percent of guests with a party affiliation were Republicans.

Call FAIR untrustworthy if you like, but you'll have a harder time dismissing The Pew Research Center.  Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded in their annual 2005 report :

Fox was measurably more one-sided than the other networks, and Fox journalists were more opinionated on the air. ... In the degree to which journalists are allowed to offer their own opinions, Fox stands out. Across the programs studied, nearly seven out of ten stories (68%) included personal opinions from Fox's reporters -- the highest of any outlet studied by far.... Those findings seem to challenge Fox's promotional marketing, particularly its slogan, "We Report. You Decide."

The report added:

Some observers might argue that opinions clearly offered as such are more honest than a slant subtly embedded in the sound bites selected or questions asked. But that was not the case here. Given the live formats on cable, the opinions of reporters and anchors are often embedded in questions or thrown in as asides. Only occasionally were they labeled as commentary.

In the UK, this is actually illegal.  You can't claim "We report, you decide" and then have your reporters constantly injecting personal opinions and half-truths into their reports.  That is why Fox News was investigated in the UK for violating its TV news misinformation laws.  And that is why Fox News is now banned there.  CNN, the BBC, and Al-Jazeera English are not (watch it before judging it).

As if this wasn't enough proof that Fox News misinforms its viewers, here are just a few specific examples:

• Watch a montage of the blatant FN promotion of the Tea Party protests.  This is from media watchdog Media Matters for America, an admitted progressive outfit.  Fox News tried to exaggerate the number of protesters and even spliced footage from a different event to make it look bigger.  Oops.

• Well-known liar Jerome Corsi was invited on Hannity & Colmes on multiple occasions ahead of the release of his book The Obama Nation.  The book is full of demonstrable lies.  One might expect a hard-hitting objective news channel to alert its viewers.  Instead, I watched Sean Hannity say proudly "We launched it right here on this program" (referring to Corsi's book).  Would a neutral and trustworthy news channel "launch" a dishonest smear book against one candidate during the heat of a political campaign?

• Fox News "broke" the false story that Obama was educated at an Islamic madrassah in Indonesia.  It was based on a conservative blog.  Oops.

• While visiting my parents, I once saw FN play -- for the second time -- a full six-and-a-half minute segment satirizing Obama as "the blessed child".  That's not news, that's propaganda, and two 6.5 minute segments is an enormous block of time.  This was all in July, right in the heat of the presidential race. 

• A self-confessed "Liberal Viewer" demonstrates pretty convincingly that Fox News basically trashed Kurt Vonnegut right after his death .  He also shows how FN edited out a follow-up question in order to make it look like Obama was contradicting himself during the 2009 Democratic primaries.  Liberal Viewer makes the same point I'm making:  Fox News has all the biases and flaws of all major media, plus an ideological bias and a consistent tendency to distort the facts in order to serve this ideology.  (Check out LiberalViewer's over 100 examples of Fox News bias and judge for yourself.)

• Look at this "interview" with a representative from Greenpeace.  How can anyone watch this juvenile attack piece and call it serious journalism?  To his credit, the Greenpeace rep. did a great job sticking to calm logic and reason.  Meanwhile, the Fox news-actress and her obnoxious male side-kick were acting buffoonishly, desperately attempting to frame environmentalists as silly loons, who barge in on us in the bathroom.  Their goal is to give viewers a misperception of the issue.

[1] Gallup poll, Feb 2009
[2] Politico.com 

[3] University of Maryland, "Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War" 2003

[4] Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

[5] The Guardian, Jan 2010

[6] FAIR