Fox was intentionally set up to promote the Republican Party and conservative agenda as opposed to being a legitimate news organization. The contrast between Fox and a legitimate news organization can be seen by comparing Fox with CNN. While CNN has hired considerably more Republicans and people with previous experience in conservative organizations than they have hired Democrats, they still strive for objectivity. In contrast, Fox was a Pravda-like defender of the Bush administration, while taking the opposite approach of attacking the White House when occupied by either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.
Fox creates a problem for Democrats such as Barack Obama. A Democratic president has to be careful about directly attacking a media outlet to avoid appearing overly-sensitive and to avoid looking like the Republicans who thrive on such attacks on the press. He has managed to get in an occasional gentle swipe at Fox. Obama responded to claims that the media has not been critical enough of him by saying, “It’s very hard for me to swallow that one. First of all, I’ve got one television station entirely devoted to attacking my administration.”
Obama did not disagree when the interviewer identified the station as Fox. Obama added, “Well, that’s a pretty big megaphone. And you’d be hard-pressed, if you watched the entire day, to find a positive story about me on that front.” Obama went on to say he welcomes “people who are asking us some, you know, tough questions.”
Obama also joked about Fox at the White House Correspondents dinner last month saying, “Most of you covered me; all of you voted for me, apologies to the Fox table.”
I don’t know who it was but I saw on C-Span a former journalist claiming there is a huge decline in news reporters/journalists. The point being there is less unbiased reporting partly because there is just less reporting. Btw, I’ve decided to go with first and last name and acronym b.t.r.m =brainwashed talk radio man or alternately = big texas rastifarian man
For years Republicans have attacked mainstream outlets like CBS, NBC and the New York Times by name. These guys a least attempt to report objectively, regardless of what the right-wingers may say.
So what if Obama occaissionally blasts the blatantly biased Fox News? I think it is about time.
…attempt to report objectively..blatantly biased.. I’m not(in this post) challenging either premise, but how do you determine if an outlet is objective, blatantly biased, or just biased while making an effort not to be biased?
If a new station opened tommorrow, what would you use to determine bias/non-bias ?
Simple bias isn’t even the issue with Fox. Fox was formed for the purpose of promoting a specific political agenda. It is a political advocacy organization, not a news organization
Cool, I didn’t know that. Where can I get more information on the original formation of Fox?
There’s an interesting new blog called The Monkey Cage written by three political scientists at the George Washington University. Any blog that takes its motto from H.L. Mencken deserves a look from libertarians.
One of the group, John Sides, has a concise and interesting post on media bias.
His claim that newspapers are in the business of confirming the prior beliefs of their readers seems accurate, and yet it confirms the original concern (or, at least, a legitimate concern) about liberal bias: responding to readers or viewers leads to a biased or distorted account of reality.
Is there a market for unbiased reporting? You would think so, but perhaps not. Maybe it doesn’t matter. We may just dump media messages, bias and all, into the marketplace of ideas and trust that something like an unbiased political result will come out the other end.
About 3 years ago a comprehensive and surprising study came out of the UCLA political science department (professors Tim Groseclose & Jeff Milyo) and was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics: A Measure of Media Bias
The goal was to apply some objective measures of bias in news outlets to see if 1) the measure would be detectable (using a Simple Structural Statistic Model) and 2) whether the measure and model would segment news outlets in terms of degree and type of bias. Here’s what they found:
“While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper’s news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.
‘I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican,” said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study’s lead author. “But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are.’
“Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left,” said co‑author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.
Here’s the introduction from their paper:
In this paper we estimate ADA (Americans for Democratic Action) scores for major media outlets such as the New York Times, USA Today, Fox News’ Special Report, and all three network television news shows. Our estimates allow us to answer such questions as “Is the average article in the New York Times more liberal than the average speech by Tom Daschle?” or “Is the average story on Fox News more conservative than the average speech by Bill Frist?” To compute our measure, we count the times that a media outlet cites various think tanks and other policy groups. We compare this with the times that members of Congress cite the same think tanks in their speeches on the floor of the House and Senate. By comparing the citation patterns we construct an ADA score. As a simplified example, imagine that there were only two think tanks, one liberal and one conservative. Suppose that the New York Times cited the liberal think tank twice as often as the conservative one. Our method asks: What is the typical ADA score of members of Congress who exhibit the same frequency (2:1) in their speeches? This is the score that we would assign to the New York Times. Our results show a strong liberal bias. All of the news outlets except Fox News’ Special Report and the Washington Times received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Consistent with many conservative critics, CBS Evening News and the New York Times received a score far left of center. Outlets such as the Washington Post, USA Today, NPR’s Morning Edition, NBC’s Nightly News and ABC’s World News Tonight were moderately left. The most centrist outlets (but still left-leaning) by our measure were the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, CNN’s NewsNight with Aaron Brown, and ABC’s Good Morning America. Fox News’ Special Report, while right of center, was closer to the center than any of the three major networks’ evening news broadcasts. All of our findings refer strictly to the news stories of the outlets. That is, we omitted editorials, book reviews, and letters to the editor from our sample.
Mike,
You might try The Republican Noise Machine by David Brock.
Yes, the Groseclose & Milyo was very interesting. Right off the bat, one can probably think of quite interesting questions to ask, e.g., what’s the relationship between a “center” normative measure and “objectivity?”
If one the googles the study, one will find a lot comment on the method and interpretation. It doesn’t settle the debate — but it’ll makes one think, which is one of the main values of research.
Chistoher- I read your post, found it vey interesting. But I wasn’t really looking for how one measures bias so much as information on the purpose of the formation of Fox. Not having any on the subject, I would first assume if a broadcast was heavily biased one way or the other, it started with the concept that that bias would sell advertising and the purpose would not be to push an agenda but to make a profit. To find something started to push an agenda, and just stumbled into profitability would be quite impressive to me, so I’ll have to check out David Brock’s information.
“I would first assume if a broadcast was heavily biased one way or the other, it started with the concept that that bias would sell advertising and the purpose would not be to push an agenda but to make a profit.”
Yes, I think this is John Side’s position.
Groseclose & Milyo tested the first assumption, i.e., news outlets are baised either one or the other. A safe assumption, but they found a pronounced skew towards the left (i.e., most outlets had that bais). Fox News’ Special Report and the Washington Times had a right bais, but they were not as far to the right as everyone else was to the left.
It’s possible because Fox is so often accused of bais, they may, in their Special Report, be behind over backwards to try to avoid that. I’ll have to start spending more time reading the Washington Times for a more neurtral slant.
Bias may or may not be based upon selling advertising. In Fox’s case the political slant was established for the purpose of promoting an agenda.
MSNBC in contrast shows an example of bias based upon profit motives. At one time they tried to be conservative because Fox was beating them and they thought that imitating Fox would be more profitable. That failed as why bother with a Fox imitator when those who want this can just watch the real thing. Once Olberman became successful they decided that they had a better chance by putting on liberals in prime time to counter Fox. As their bias is profit-driven should political conditions change they could easily change thier bias if they thought that a different bias would make more money.
Meanwhile CNN is currently dominated by conservatives but they promote themselves as being the real news to counter the more biased cable networks, and they wind up being far more objective than Fox and MSNBC in their coverage.
This is a reply to Jamal: Yes Obama was born by a muslim man and why can’t you say he was born and raised by a white lady. Some of you guys are so cutup with hate that you can’t even entertain some reasonable truth about obama.
Also what kind of message are you sending to muslim armies serving us in Iraq, are you saying they are design to be ourslaves and don’t fit the model of a ruler.
I think this was first broken on the (liberal?) CBS news site. If there’s something to, we can expect a lot of bit and blogging about it:
The Justice Department confirmed last week that FBI agents in Afghanistan are reading Miranda warnings to suspected terrorists captured there, a practice that Republican congressmen this week branded as “crazy” and “stupid.”
On the face of it, this is weird . . .
I’m still in my initial stages of researching this. The origin of Fox news seems to be connected to Rupert Murdoch and his political leanings seem to be quite a mixed bag. Basically it seems his interest is dealing with anyone that may get him business leverage. That being said, I still don’t have my hands on “Republican Noise Machine” nor do I assume that just because someone is owner and/or financed something that that person is the only one to influence the outcome of the product. I’ve started regularly reading a couple other blogs. There is one thing I personally like about this one over the other two. While I find more harmony in the ideas expressed on GTL’s and Malik’s blog. The glitz and advertising is a bit of an eyesore on those others. I like the calm,orderly look of this site. I’m sure Dr. Ron would change out if he could pull in Michelle Malik advertising dollars, but as a reader, I’m happy with how things are.
In researching the formation of Fox, keep in mind that Rupert Murdoch was not the only key player. You are right n a sense. If Murdoch thought he could make big money by making a liberal network it is possible that he would change. What is also significant is the involvement of Roger Ailes who is the one who really influenced the outcome.
It has been amusing from time to time when anchors at Fox have actually slipped and used language along the lines of us vs. them when talking about Republicans and Democrats.