Not Outfoxed by Fox
Moveon.org has filed a complaint with the FTC charging that the FOX News "fair and balanced" trademark amounts to false advertising. I support any activity that further exposes the way this network openly twists the facts; however, I have not made it to Outfoxed yet. I guess my attitude has been that the movie is just another exhibit in a long list of evidence against the network. FOX's slanting goes beyond the inherent biases under which media work.
EXTRA, the magazine published by FAIR(FAIRNESS IN ACCURACY AND REPORTING), has been documenting FOX's misrepresentations on an ongoing basis. This month researchers take a look at the biases of Special Report with Brit Hume , the network's premier news show. (Yes, FAIR has a progressive agenda, but it also takes on the mainstream press and networks, including NPR.)
One of the more damning pieces of evidence documenting the effects of FOX's skewed take on the world can be found in a report PIPA released last spring. The report, a result of several surveys, outlines the three mpst pervasive misconceptions Americans have had about the war in Iraq: belief in a link between Iraq and September 11; belief that most of the world supported the invasion; belief thatweapons of mass destruction were found and/or Iraq used such weapons during the war. There are several reasons for this faulty thinking, but researchers found a correlation between faulty views and news media preference. People who watched FOX NEWS were more apt to have one or all of the misconceptions the researchers explored. FOX can't be blamed completely. There are compound effects at work. People with a certain worldview tune in because they feel FOX supports that worldview, and it is possible that these people "hear" things that FOX did not actually report. Moreover, some work in political psychology research indicates that the hard core conservative/Republican is more apt to talk to people with similar views, and this would reinforce some of the misconceptions. Here's the abstract from a pretty interesting study on the matter. You can read a press release, too.
The Impact of Individual and Interpersonal Factors on Perceived News Media Bias
Political Psychology, March 2003, vol. 24, no.1. pp. 101-117 (17)
Eveland W.P.[1]; Shah D.V.[2]
[1] Ohio State University, [2] University of Wisconsin–Madison
Abstract:
A large percentage of the public believes that the news media are biased, and the majority of these individuals consider the direction of bias to be against their own viewpoints. Past research has examined how individual factors such as strength of partisanship or extent of political involvement heighten bias perceptions, but little attention has been paid to interpersonal factors such as the ideological similarity or dissimilarity of personal communication networks. Results of a national survey show that perceptions of media bias were unrelated to the overall amount of discussion but were positively related to conversations with ideologically like–minded individuals. Moreover, the impact of conversations with similar others was stronger among Republicans than among Democrats, a finding consistent with recent work on news self–coverage of media bias claims.
