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Fox News Considered Suing Fox's "The Simpsons"
ZeDanimal writes "The Simpsons' pooh-bah Matt Groening said in an NPR interview this week that the Fox News Channel considered legal action against the show for its parody of the station's news ticker. Broadcast, of course, by Fox Entertainment, the episode that raised the ire of the "Fair and Balanced" Fox News crew was Krusty For Congress, which mocked the perceived rightward-leanings of the channel with pseudo-news items such as "Do Democrats cause cancer?" and "Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple" scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Guess the powers-that-be learned something from the Al Franken affair... or maybe they just feared getting into a popularity contest with the likes of the inanimate carbon rod."
Well, this should put to rest what Fox thinks of their viewership:
"Now Fox has a new rule that we can't do those little fake news crawls on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking it's real news," he said.
Yes because "Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple..." is very believable and I can't believe all those dirty environmentalists have been lying to us! Oh, and JFK really DID join the replicans after death.
Facts are Fox Evening news is a joke, and when I had the (dis)pleasure of watching it once at a friends, I seriously thought it was a parody of news since it was so distasteful and circus-like. I honestly see these parody-tickers as an IMPROVEMENT to their otherwise shitty, imcomplete, skewed news.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Fresh Air
Matt has a few other in the archives.
They took 3 polls with 3334 respondents, gathering data on three misperceptions about the Iraq war
(1) Evidence found for link between Iraq and Al Queda
(2) Evidence found of WMDs in Iraq
(3) Positive world opinion about Iraq war
News_source______FOX_____CBS_____ABC_____NBC_____ CNN___Print_____NPR/
_________________________________________________ _____Sources____PBS
0_misperceptions_20%_____30%_____39%_____45%_____ 45%_____53%_____77%
1_or_more
misperceptions___80______71______61______55______ 55______47______23
Yep, you read that right; fully 80% of Faux watchers had at least 1 of the misperceptions; fully 77% of the NPR/PBS crowd had zero. Wow!
They also attempted to control for demographic variations in the audience. Here's what they say (end of P.15)
I also really like this paragraph (page 16): Isn't that amazing? The more you read the paper, or watch CNN, the better informed you are. But the more you watch Faux News, the more likely you are to be misled!! Now of course these are correlations; they don't prove causation, but they are pretty darned persuasive.This study was commented on in the wash post seattle times twin cities and other places
The one place you I can guarentee you won't find it is fox news!
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
What a bottomless pit of stupidity yes-men media is.
I don't have time to find the links right now, but this poll does not prove what it claims to. The most glaring problem with it was that they asked about certain "misperceptions" that a right-winger would tend to have, but not about "misperceptions" that a left-winger would tend to have.
For example, if I polled whether George W. Bush claimed that Iraq's WMDs were an imminent threat before the war, I bet a very high perception of NPR listeners would answer yes, while a very low percentage of Fox watchers would answer yes. Does that mean that Fox watchers are better informed across the board than NPR listeners? No. It just means that each has its blind spots.
I'm not an American, but I can clearly see the two-party-system is wrong and undemocratical. How can you even try to divide the views of 300 million people in two giant categories, one being right-wing and another being slightly less right-wing?
I think it's time for some serious fragmentation in the american political landscape.
As a side effect, it will become much harder for large corporations to buy off political parties when there's more of them...
Some of you even seem to believe they have different policies
Well, they do have different policies. Otherwise they would just agree on everything wouldn't they? Personally, I think the Democrats to be the lesser evil. At least they're not trying to strip down the social security system, which is already down on one knee, so to speak.
"Hell hath no fury like a hippo with a machine gun."
The history here is that the head of Fox News, Roger Aisles is a long time Republican activist and partisan. He was put in charge of the news operation for the sole purpose of slanting the news to the extreme right.
To get an idea of what really goes on at Fox take a read of the experiences of people who have worked there. Every day a note goes arround called 'The Memo' which contains the Republican party messages of the day. If you do not toe the line then you get fired. This is a bad thing since experience working at Fox news does not exactly enhance your resume when applying for a job with the real media.
You can tell this is going on because Fox was even able to report Bush's claim that the Whitehouse did not order the 'Mission Accomplished' banner with a straight face.
So yes it is completely believable that the executives running this bubble world outfit would have so little clue about the real world as to threaten to sue another Murdoch production - in this case a production that can if it choose defect at will to another station and a production that makes money rather than looses it hand over fist.
Fox News does well in the ratings but very poorly with advertisers. The problem is that its core democratic of poor middle aged southern white racist men do not have much in the way of buying power. Advertisers much prefer to reach 18-35 audiences, gays, professionals, etc. in short pretty much everyone who is unlikely to watch Fox. In fact advertising on Fox News actually trades at a discount to other broadcasts reaching the same demographic because advertisers know that many of the demographics they do want are actually less likely to buy a product they see advertised on a channel they associate with biggotry.
The joke on the GOP and the likes of Bill O'Really is that Murdoch has no ideological commitments only business interests. He is quite happy running a Pro-Bejing communist sympathetic news channel on his Asian Star TV and he does not broadcast the BBC signal which might offend the dictators. In the UK Murdoch is quite happy to support Tony Blair's government, provided they do not threaten his economic interests. Murdoch undoubtedly considers his US channels in the same way, if Bush looses power in such a way that a return of Republican government looks to be unlikely in the near future then Fox news will flip flop to the left.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Apparently the way to get modded as insightful is to reply to a post and say that it was insightful. I find that interesting.