“Fox News: King of the Cable News Networks – continuously #1 rate for well over a decade. Why is it so loved by so many and so hated by so many others??” Fox News has been given a number of different titles, and nicknames throughout its existence since its debut in 1996. Fox News has been, according to their mission statement, providing a 24 hour political, sports, business, nationwide, worldwide, local and breaking news to the public through a number of different mediums (Fox News Channel Press). To most people Fox News is their selected choice for a news provider, however, a large selection of people feel it is completely biased and is not truthful. This contradicts its widely known and published slogan “Fair and unbalanced.” So why exactly is Fox News preferred by so many people, yet at the same time it is hated by so many others? What makes this #1 rated news station so terrible? Fox News is constantly being bombarded with accusations of media bias, furthermore, a number of different instances of have occurred which question the validity of Fox News (Groeling). These instances occur throughout normal news broadcasts. Some of the more recent, and grossly biased broadcasts, were from the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. Historically the Fox News Channel is known to lean heavily to the right, or on the republican spectrum. President Barrack Obama’s political party is widely known to the public as being democratic. Statistically, to this day according to studies over 17 million households receive some form of the Fox News Channel (Auletta). The Fox News Channel is published through a number of different channels to its viewers. These channels include: Television, radio, newspaper, internet and more increasingly electro... ... middle of paper ... ...ich as a result, keeps those individuals with Fox News as opposed to using other sources of news. Because so many people over the age of 65 watch Fox News consistently, during retirement, it keeps Fox News’ ratings and reception remarkably high. Whereas, different kinds of viewers dislike Fox News because of its political bias, which as a result gives it negative ratings. With every large successful materialistic object or figure in society comes its pros and cons. For the Fox News Channel, these pros and cons include its overall ratings and viewership. For over a number of years Fox News has remained atop of the rating scale in the number one spot, providing the public with the news. People claim it is biased and justly unfair, however, it is that very news that they produce which has made it famous and one of the most well respected news networks to this day.
Estrich not only falls prey to generalization fallacy but also to faulty cause and special pleading fallacies. The greater issue with Estrich’s arguments is that the premise in her arguments are not supported by strong evidence. In many cases, Estrich does not provide any evidence for the claims that she makes. The lack of evidence and the use of fallacies collectively make Estrich’s article a very poor defense of Fox News. It should also be understood that many of Estrich’s arguments are also not explicitly mentioned and hence an average reader might not be able to infer Estrich’s arguments. Indeed, Estrich could have made her argument stronger by supporting her claims by strong evidence and writing in a clearer and concise
Large American media conglomerates have been growing increasingly polarized on the political spectrum, each network presenting information and reporting on stories using angles that benefit the political party that they support (Prior). Most notably, Fox News is infamous for being a partisan news channel that strongly supports the conservative Republican Party, despite the fact that its motto is “fair and balanced” (“Fox News.”). According to a New York Times editorial, “[Fox News’] claim to be fair and balanced is no more than a knowing wink to its audience, and has no higher master than the dollar” (Crossman). For example, in 2012, during the presidential election, Fox News anchor Sean Hannity blatantly lied to his audience, claiming that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had stated that if President Barack Obama won a second term, “[t]axes [would] go up 30 percent” (Uwimana). In reality, the CBO report had merely been talking about fiscal bills that were in effect at the time, and had not mentioned anything about President Obama (Uwimana). However, Hannity still falsified information in order to support his own conservative agenda. Such political polarization in the media leads to a public that is increasingly misinformed. Further exacerbating the problem, Fox News often stages debates over facts rather than over opposing viewpoints (Scherer). There have been numerous occasions in which Hannity and other anchors have called into question the legitimacy of the scientific consensus on global warming (Rudman). By calling the legitimacy and reality of such facts into question, Fox News casts doubt on scientifically established principles such as climate change, and on other important facts that could potentially help clarify the true nature of
Since the advent of television networks, Americans have relied on local and national newscasts to inform them of the world’s happenings. In the 1950’s there were no other mass informational outlets besides the network news and newspapers. Today we have the internet, which allows independent research, but the majority of Americans still depend on network and cable newscasts for their local, political, and foreign news. With the responsibility and power of informing an entire country, are television newscasts as reliable as most Americans assume them to be? Most Americans don’t consider where their news is coming from or who is producing it. Network and cable news are owned and operated by people and thus are not as objective and unbiased as we would like to think. In light of the war in Iraq and the most recent presidential election, critics of television network administration are voicing their concern for today’s presentation of the news. Increasingly more Americans are demanding a rehabilitation of newscasts, starting with ownership.
In one sense, Fox is an easy target. Few would accuse Fox News of objectivity. And despite Ailes's promises of objectivity, despite the widely-held conservative belief in a "liberal media," Outf...
Blanda explains Fox News, Red State or Slate links only exist to produce content to be shared so friends can agree with each other and those who disagree. “Sharing links that mock a caricature of the other side isn’t signaling that we’re somehow more informed” – Sean Blanda. It shows people would rather show off to their friends how much they’re like them rather than try to understand an opinion different then
Both CNN and Fox News influence these immense populations with how each utilize pathos, ethos and logos in the topics discussed during the broadcasted show. For example, Fox News 's audience seems to be primarily conservative, while CNN’s audience seem to be more liberal (Engel). So each network’s stories “focus on the issues that” conservatives or liberals “want to watch and talk about” (James). These topics are used to develop a more conservative or liberal fan base in the respective news networks. As the dominant news network on cable television, Fox News impacts the greatest quantity of citizens, bringing in an audience of over two million for primetime (James). Therefore, Fox News influences the largest percentage of Americans listening to news networks by effectively using these manipulative literary techniques. However, CNN has a younger audience than Fox News (Carter), which contributes to CNN’s audience growing from 350,000 a night, in 2013 (Agee), to 629,000 viewers a night (James). CNN and Fox News compete with each other to influence the greatest amount of people and the public’s opinion of current events. Each network appeals to pathos, logos and ethos differently and similarly to coax the greatest amount of listeners each night.
Television, more so than any other form of communication, has been the ultimate tool of the propaganda effort. It is the trustworthiest medium to give us the subjective validity of our beliefs which can not be proven physically. It is the ultimate source from which we get evidence about objective reality, motivated by our desires to form an accurate view of this reality and to act correctly. United States is the biggest economical power in the world today, and consequently has the largest media and news industry. The gatekeepers of the American news industry control all the information, and decide what to publish or broadcast, based on the ideology and the structure of the institution. Therefore, whatever is presented in the news would probably be a part of the popular culture (created by the entertainment industry) or would serve it since the popular culture itself is created for the growth of the capitalist economy and the homogenization of the society, which are essential elements for a stable system. That is why the American media is terribly bias in many respects, especially in the matters of foreign affairs, driven by self b...
Although, in recent years it is seen that consumers are less likely to subscribe to newspapers and/or watch the daily news. This is due to the fact that they are typically bias in their opinions, and are seen to lack the whole story when presented. Rise in polarization in the media is due to a new found competition between news networks, which was not present sixty years ago. Wilson says, “the news we get is not only more omnipresent, it is also more competitive and hence often more adversarial”. The media outlets are fighting for views, and are willing to do whatever it takes to get them. Which leads to them configuring the stories to what people want to here. Thus making their viewer ratings higher. It is known that certain news stations get more views depending on the political party. “Those who watch CNN are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans; the reverse is emphatically true of Fox”. The media has more outlets to reach their viewers to maximize the effectiveness of their biased
Many people believe that liberal media bias is very relevant in this day in age, but really it is just a myth. Conservatives, also known as republicans, tend to forget that most of the American media is influenced heavily by corporate business owners(Schaller 49). Topics such as issues of war and peace, taxes and spending, and government regulation are heavily favorable to the conservatives. A study done by Media Matter for America shows that over sixty percent of U.S. daily newspapers publish conservative journalists rather than liberal(Schaller 49). On the other hand, it is obvious that some hot topics in the news are liberally skewed.
From politics to weather, anyone who works for news media knows that they have to be unbiased on the information they report to millions of Americans. As citizens with little free time,we have no choice but to trust what information is given in newspapers, radios and televisions. However, only 4 out of every 10 Americans say they truly believe what their news channel televise, a historical low in America. News channels, especially in the big corporations, are being corrupted with prejudice information, imbalance of news coverage, and distorted stories.
This paper will cover the omnipresence of media biases and their implications in three news stories from various newspapers including The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times through content-analysis and comparison. Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro in “Media Bias and Reputation”from the Journal of Political Economy argue that media biases, distort information to make it conform with consumers’ prior [political] beliefs in order to shape reports in whatever way will be most likely to improve the reputations of media outlets [thus increasing future profits by expanding the demand for their products] (Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2006, pg. 282). Additionally, in Four Information Biases That Matter W. Lance Bennett suggests that biases in the the news overwhelmingly plays to the human-interest angle and fragments the stories. The prevalence toward personalization and fragmentation biases engages readers through conformation to prior beliefs, such as using bias to affect readers’ political leanings and ultimately increases demand for their publication through likability and inquisition caused by unclear, fragmented stories.
Mifflin, Lawrie. "At the new Fox News Channel, the buzzword is fairness, separating news from bias.." The New York Times. The New York Times, 6 Oct. 1996. Web. 25 Apr. 2014. .
“At MSNBC … 85 percent of airtime is dedicated to commentary — rather than straight news” (as cited in Kiener). The fact that over three fourths of the airtime for a news media source is commentary shows the degradation of trustworthy news reporting. Mainstream news sources are losing their credibility through their slanted reporting and lack of objectivity.
After twenty-eight years working for CBS, Bernard Goldberg decided that he no longer wanted to work for a news station he didn’t admire. Thus, he resigned and began work on his book Bias; a book in which he merely draws attention to the media for reporting from a leftist perspective, preventing the audience from receiving an objective, unbiased view of what really goes on in our world. As an “old-fashioned liberal,” as he calls himself, he does not attempt to gain conservative support for accusing liberals of bias. Rather, he would prefer liberal support for acknowledging this problem in hopes of changing the face of news. He bases his book on his personal experience as a former news anchor for CBS. Despite popular belief, he meant no harm in his book (or in his editorials) to his previous employees. His only hope was to point out an alarmingly, already well-known fact; that reporters, even if unintentionally, at news stations like CBS, NBC, and ABC report the news from their liberal viewpoint, inhibiting their audiences’s right to an accurate portrayal of our news.
Many studies, dating back to the early 1980s, have concluded that members of the national press are more liberal than the average citizen. Not only is the media more liberal, but they also tend to be more secular. Conservative media outlets have become more visible in recent years. More radio talk shows, such as those hosted by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, are politically conservative. As well as some of the television reporting broadcast on Fox News, such as on the O’Reilly Factor. Limbaugh and Hannity have large audiences, and Fox News has grown in popularity (WDB