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Pew Research Finds Opinion Dominates MSNBC More Than Fox News
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Jack Mirkinson reports that Pew Research Center's annual "State of the Media" study found that, since 2007, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC have all cut back sharply on the amount of actual reporting found on their airwaves. Cheaper, more provocative debate or interview segments have largely filled the void. Pew found that Fox News spent 55 percent of the time on opinion and 45 percent of the time on reporting. Critics of that figure would likely contend that the network's straight news reporting tilts conservative, but it is true that Fox News has more shows that feature reporting packages than MSNBC does. According to Pew MSNBC made the key decision to reprogram itself in prime time as a liberal counterweight to the Fox News Channel's conservative nighttime lineup. The new MSNBC strategy and lineup were accompanied by a substantial cut in interview time and sharply increased airtime devoted to edited packages. The Pew Research examination of programming in December 2012 found MSNBC by far the most opinionated of the three networks, with nearly 90% of MSNBC's primetime coverage coming in the form of opinion or commentary."
[my surprised face]
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
That seems pretty useless if it doesn't also measure how often the purported news is incorrect or biased. If it counts as news but is still pushing a liberal or conservative view then that has the same or worse effect than commentary.
This is as misleading as the studies that "disproved" that organic food is more nutritious. Nobody was making the claim they disproved. The basic claim about Fox News' bias is that every single story is framed in such a way to reinforce a distorted, reactionary worldview.
Let me ask you.. who in the world would try to get information from mainstream media?
You have the internet, ignorance and manipulation is a choice.
As long as its labeled opinion. Fox'es problem is they mix and blur fact,opinion and ideology to promote their aims.
Fair and balanced! Fair and balanced!
(Repeat until liberal heads start exploding)
[Insert pretentious and semi-clever sig here: ______ ]
This is as misleading as the studies that "disproved" that organic food is more nutritious. Nobody was making the claim they disproved. The basic claim about Fox News' bias is that every single story is framed in such a way to reinforce a distorted, reactionary worldview, even when it's supposedly NOT an opinion piece.
The problem is they both select their event reporting based on their respective biases and spin it with intentionally chosen words to goose their respective target audiences. To be able to label any one time slice from either network as pure unbiased reporting is pretty rare. Just because there's an anchor talking at the camera instead of a bunch of pundits talking over each other doesn't make it not opinion.
Yeah, take that Pew! If your puny "facts" don't agree with my bias, then you're total assholes and must be dismissed!!
Fuck Pew, they also said bloggers aren't journalists. (Sure, not automatically, but they aren't automatically not, either.) Listening to Pew at this point is like trusting Elsevier.
Hmmm..."not automatically, but they aren't automatically not"...yes, clearly we should "fuck" Pew here and follow this logic.
Sensationalism is what sells ratings. Like we should be shocked that this is now applied to the "news" hour?
After all, at the end of the day it's not about news it's about ratings, and you're competing against MTV. Looking at their "entertainment" lineup, you can see why it is a formidable mental challenge to cull the dumb-masses away from watching Honey Boo Boo with baited breath.
This is it, folks
Journalism has gone comatosed
With so many people calling themselves "journalists" - I think we have the most number of "journalists" in this world right now than any other period of human history - it is ironic that REAL JOURNALISM has gone to the dogs
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
If they have to tell you that they are 'fair and balanced' then its likely that they aren't, but also add in everything that tells you that it 'leans forward', or other crap.
The Soviet Unions national newspaper, during the height of the governments paranoid plummet into self destruction, was called 'Pravda' which translates to 'Truth' or 'Justice' in Russian.
When was the last time a 'breaking story' was something uncovered by an investigative reporter, rather than spoon fed to it by pundits or politicians?
"His name was James Damore."
...can see why it is a formidable mental challenge to cull the dumb-masses away from watching Honey Boo Boo with baited breath.
I think I clearly read that phonetically as 'dumb-asses'!
Before we had a 24 hour news cycle there was still some merit in reviewing coverage of an event or an idea from multiple sources. It was more difficult then, because a good deal of the time Brokaw, Rather, and the morning paper were repeating the same AP/Reuters news report. Today you can get your news du jour on several cable channels, the networks, and at least a thousand places on the interwebs. It is still a good idea to check a story in more than one place before accepting it as accurate.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Opinions are cheap. Reporters cost money.
Increasingly, people only seem to care about being outraged, anyway. Just look at all the blogs out there -- they're basically nothing more than "outrage of the day" articles, cynically designed to appeal to shallow, emotional outbursts. Slashdot is often guilty of this, as well. I'm not sure whether this trend took hold in Old Media or New Media first, but it has totally dominated New Media, and now the Old Media are struggling to stay relevant, by showing they can be just as fluffy and reactionary as the New Media. In some ways, I think this is just a natural progression of trends started in the 1990s. Hell, maybe it started a lot earlier than that, but that's when I remember things getting worse. My parents would probably say it started around 60s or 70s.
Polling "data" like this just reinforces how useless polling services are when trying to report on the real world.
When you can call "factual" reporting like "Obama surrendering US sovereignty to the UN" based on a made up conspiracy theory a news story but an in depth, factual analysis of Paul Ryan's budget proposal as opinion, you've given up all claims to credibility.
Bloviating is cheap and easy, actual reporting is expensive and hard. What more do you need to know?
This ironically because real journalism requires a expense account with no strings attached.
This so that said journalist is free to pack up and go where the story takes him or her with no worry that it will flatline them economically.
This is "american politics without any relevance to what slashdot should be".
This is getting even dumber and dumber. Lucky I do not create any revenue for this site.
Bated breath, shortened from abated breath, is what you were looking for unless you meant their breath smells like they've been eating fishing bait.
Nowhere. Ever. Why does anyone ever think that something like this could exist? Because you have free press? That only means that they are allowed to spread different lies than the government.
EVERY kind of reporting is biased. Even just reporting a fact is, because the question is why this fact was reported and not another one. And considering the amount of stuff happening around the globe, even trying to report everything to give a fully unbiased view is a futile task.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Newspapers and other publications were traditionally politically biased, mostly printed by someone to put their own slant on things. Journalism is historically gonzo, it's only recently that this fair and impartial notion has arisen. I guess people like to read things that agree with their ideas.
The basic claim about Fox News' bias is that every single story is framed in such a way to reinforce a distorted, reactionary worldview, even when it's supposedly NOT an opinion piece.
I am a huge fan of the Economist. One day while discussing a political and economic issue, I rather smugly expressed my point of view only to have it dawn on me later that I parroted the Economist's (Schumpeter column - IIRC) opinion on a certain issue. Not that it's necessarily wrong and they do have excellent analysis (they also pepper opinion throughout EVERYTHING in their magazine),but what disturbed me was that I wasn't thinking for myself and I wasn't aware of it.
I was/am no better than the Fox News watching lemming masses and I hate it!
I'm doing what I can to mitigate media opinions - like see the data for myself; try to get the original source; and just consume less.
And another explanation is the exact opposite. No study was done to confirm either position. Spouting either without having done so is worse than opinion; it's claiming fact without substantiation.
Pew Research Finds Opinion Dominates MSNBC More Than Fox News
The headline suggests that Fox's news is less opinionated than MSNBC's News.
Pew found that Fox News spent 55 percent of the time on opinion and 45 percent of the time on reporting... with nearly 90% of MSNBC's primetime coverage coming in the form of opinion or commentary.
So we're talking about the type of shows being aired on the channel: "News"* or Opinion, not the slant of the news being presented. It would be more accurate to say "MSNBC Primetime Programming Reformulated to Include Nearly 90% Opinion," but that wouldn't be as provocative and get as many page views.
Fox News has a history of presenting "news" that is so slanted it's the butt of many jokes ("that story is so biased it should be on Fox News... if only it was funny it could be on the Onion"), so I'd argue that Fox's "News" programming counts in the opinion category.
That said, the story is actually about the increased polarization between MSNBC's lineup and Fox's. One would like think that a "news" channel as laughably-biased as Fox would not survive long, because it's not actually providing news. But they're successful because they've found that people want to be told things that seem to reinforce their own perceptions. That keeps them watching. MSNBC is just acknowledging this and reformulating to do the same for the left-leaning audience.
This is a bad thing, even if you're too intelligent to watch either of these channels, because they suck people in and polarize opinions. Then people walk around spreading these polarized opinions by word of mouth like conspiracy theories, and you end up with polarized politicians running the country who have no reason to compromise and get things done because they won't be re-elected if they compromise.
*As a former print journalist, I think all TV "news" is garbage by design. It's Jerry-Springer-esque entertainment disguised as news. It's formulated to tease you with provocative blurbs suggesting they're going to give you some juicy story, after you watch a bunch of other stuff and commercials. When they finally get to the promised story, it typically contains far less information than a print news story would because it takes too much time to do that much talking, and most people would lose interest part-way through.
~laugh~ caught MSNBC in several blatant "opinions", they are plenty guilty of biased, ass.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Yeah, shoot a laser pistol at them. Pew, pew, pew!
At least Fox tries to pretend its unbiased. Whereas Fox has never-ending coverage of why all Democrat policies are bad, MSNBC has never-ending coverage of how all Republicans are evil racists that want to rape all women all the time and kill old people and put blacks back into slavery. MSNBC "personalities", openly, with no hint of irony, call a white republican a racist and a black republican a "house negro" in the same breath. On a nearly daily basis to boot. There is not even the slightest pretense of unbiased coverage with MSNBC, its a straight-up fifth column. It spreads the holy message of the democratic party as though it was gospel, no matter how ridiculous that message might be on a particular day.
I think I'll stick with my BBC News thank you, I like their proper British matter-of-factly way of telling the news and outside looking in approach to US coverage.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
Indeed
"Democrats fail to undermine Republican policy with lies" vs. "Flaws in Republican scheme ignored, despite Democrat efforts".
(Feel free to switch the names around).
From what I've seen, both MSNBC and Fox are both pretty much all opinion all the time, to the point of being detrimental rather than useless as sources of news.
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Fox News is propaganda, not opinion. A set of writers write and endless series of paid for attacks, and because each is crafted individually, they continually contradict themselves.
That's not the same as opinion, a person who has an opinion tends to consistent in that view until it becomes untenable against the facts.
Put simply, they don't believe the BS they spout and they continue to spout it even to the extent of hiding evidence, and playing footage of one event and pretending its another (i.e. knowingly lying).
But you can see it their actions too, when they tried to convince General Petraeus to run for President, they offered him Fox News as a promotional tool. i.e. clearly they know they are a propaganda operation because they offered him the use of that propaganda tool. If the presenters were spouting their own opinion, then Fox president couldn't have guaranteed that to Petraeus:
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/04/fox_news_president_reportedly_tried_to_get_petraeus_to_run_for_president/
Of course the question is, what was the quid pro quo if they got Petraeus elected. They would own the presidency.
Sorry, but I can't find that claim in the linked report. I only find the statistics that about 1/3 of all bloggers consider what they do jounalism. The report also mention that even those who don't, usually fact-check.
If the report claims this and I just didn't find it, please say where exacty this claim can be found.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It took a study to determine that Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN aren't really news?! I thought this was common knowledge.
I know what you said to be true because I would bribe the town crier to stop talking about my warrant inside the animus.
Specifically, what it says is that both MSNBC and Fox are more than 50% opinion (well, non-news "analysis", anyway). So, these are primarily "chat" sources rather than news sources.
if you want actual news, according to this, go to CNN.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
There are a number of problems at the heart of what's wrong with journalism.
The first is celebrity culture, so there's a persistent undercurrent of self-aggrandizement. They'll latch on to big stories as a way to make a name for themselves, creating a natural inclination to sensationalize. In the mean time they're not really doing anything beyond talking to a camera. The closest thing they do to journalism is interviews. And when that happens if they like the interviewee it's a soft-ball puff piece, when they don't it's nothing but loaded messages to convey a particular message.
The second, bigger problem is that journalists don't see it as their job to inform, they think it's their duty to educate. The distinction is that in the former journalists are merely describing what happened, with the latter they're lulled into pushing agendas. This guarantees bias. This is when journalists approach a story with a hypothesis, find it disproved in research, but because it violates their worldview they get selective with facts and twist them to suit their viewpoint.
Bloggers are amongst the worst. When the topics are apolitical too many of them turn into hangers-on. It's celebrity by association, that they're somehow a crucial component to someone else's success and popularity. When the topics are political, then it's the worst kind of blogger circle-jerk. Some blogger somewhere posts some heavily slanted story which everyone else then reposts as fact adding their own pointless commentary.
The most obnoxious thing here is that simply looking at both sides doesn't translate into balance. Often times you're just getting extremist views with no substantive facts.
I think we have the most number of "journalists" in this world right now than any other period of human history - it is ironic that REAL JOURNALISM has gone to the dogs
Yes, it is highly ironic that I have to go to blogs to get news because the mainstream "news" outlets are controlled by corrupt corporate interests.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
His explanation didn't at all involve MSNBC being unbiased. It involved it being exactly as biased as the study claims, but Fox more biased than the study claims, while still not necessarily being as biased as MSNBC.
Possibly. I use neither as news sources (and I definitely lean liberal, but I try to get news from non-ridiculous conservative news sources to have an understanding of why people think differently).
Does anyone here get their news from anyone of these stations? Goodness I hope not. LOL I watch them for sheer entertainment, and gossip. Ill stick with C-span, for Government. Independent papers and news media as much as possible...and on occasion BBC and PBS. OOh and When is Dave Chapelle coming back to television? I do not watch much television because what is on is crap...and what I do watch is usually made for cable and then I have to wait months before its return......or edutv. LOL sir_wolfie@yahoo.com
Rush Limbaugh said during one of his recent shows that his main goal on the show is to make money, and that spreading and arguing for Conservatism is a close second. I don't remember when he said that, so you'll just have to take my word with a grain of salt...but at least he was being honest about it.
Make no mistake that TV stations exist to make money, and they do it by getting viewers and selling ads. Fox has been more successful at doing that in their category than their competition. I don't watch any televised news; usually I'm watching the History Channel while I eat dinner. I otherwise get my news from at least half-a-dozen places online, and I'm at peace knowing that:
- They only get information (whether true or not) that they go out to find, or that their sources give them; and that we see an abridged, cleaned up presentation of that information
- We never get the whole story
- We're all biased because we're human. It's just who we are.
- I should take everything presented to me with a grain of salt
- Audio and video can be doctored or misrepresented (George Zimmerman recordings, Reuters images...)
- Quotes can easily be taken out of context or also misrepresent facts
- Correlation != Causation
And possibly the most important:
- Stay the hell away from people who get all bent out of shape over politics
But I seem to be breaking that last rule by coming to Slashdot...
How about a law to require them to put "opinion" in the corner of the screen when they're just spouting crap.
No sig today...
Not sure why anyone would watch either one.
What is particularly egregious are show hosts feeling there is nothing wrong with using their shows as platforms to constantly propogate their own beliefs and pet issues. They are essentially video bloggers with the same amount of informative content and sense of reality as any pile of hogwash streaming outta the Interwebs.
For all of the selling out to convinence, lack of discipline and self control their ratings still suck.
Talk about an oxymoron! As some wag once said, never let facts get in the way of a good story! :rolleyes:
Elephant in the room time: MSNBC is the liberal propaganda arm of the democratic party. MSNBC tries to ignore stories that have any whiff of putting their glorious democrats in a bad light while simultaneously manufacturing outrage over conservatives in the hopes of distracting the public from seing the democrats as they really are.
So spare us the "Fox News is worse" garbage. While the Fox News slant is well known and acknowledged, every other news organization is left-of-center and denies it has any bias whatsoever. If MSNBC can't be relied upon to report all stories, even those that are negative to democrats, then it is a propaganda firm, not a news oranization.
Does MSNBC's 85% opinion consist of both liberal and conservative views? Of course not! The 85% is at least 85% liberal opinion. Does Fox news 55% opinion consist of both liberal and conservative views? Yes it does. Some of the liberals, independents, or non-conservatives that are now, or have been, on Fox are: Bob Beckel, Alan Colmes, Susan Estrich, Mara Liasson, Santita Jackson, Kirsten Powers, Geraldo Rivera, Simon Rosenberg, Bill Schulz, Shepard Smith, Juan Williams. Conservatives on MSNBC? Tucker Carlson, Michael Savage, Joe Scarborough (arguably fiscally conservative, socially liberal RINO). Sounds like MSNBC's reporting is severely un-fair and un-balanced.
With a name like that, and a straight-as-boy-scout delivery, you can't beat it !!
http://americanprofile.com/articles/toria-tolley-cnn/
Not my opinion !! It is FACT !!
This is exactly correct. Yes, MSNBC is biased and broadcasts opinion, but they don't try to pull off rebranding it as news. Their motto is "Lean Forward." Fox claims to be "Fair and Balanced," and has segments called stuff like "No Spin Zone" that are nothing but pure spin.
I personally don't care if a network says, "Here are shows that are sharply left/right," but what I take issue with is when a network presents itself as an unbiased news source and then proceeds to opine one way or another.
Let's just summarize the hundreds of Slashdot posts.
But Fox News is propaganda!
But MSNBC sux!
But Fox News is propaganda!
But MSNBC sux!
Hmmm. Apparently Slashdot has issues with nested blockquotes. Slashdot sux!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"All the news that's fit to tint."
What surprises me is that ANY of their content is considered "reporting". They don't even try to do news.
Fuck Fox and MSNBC they both suck.
(well, it's over 90%) are white and most C*O jobs are held by WASPs, then there really IS a "white privilege".
However, where in all that does it say that white men are raping all our children and eat the livers of pregnant latino mothers or whatever shit you were complaining about?
Yet another indicator of the dismal quality of today' s US news reporting.
Luckily, some of the smaller guys still know how it's done. These days I get most of my news from The Onion and The Daily Show. I've found them to be much more reliable.
Well that's just, like, your opinion, man.
The fact that MSNBC has more opinion shows than FoxNews is not the point. MSNBC doesn't format their programming so their opinion shows appear to be news shows. On the other hand, it is often very difficult to tell if one is watching a news program or a opinion show.
Put differently, nobody mistakes the content of the Today show for the Nightly News on NBC. Nor do people mistake Rachel Madow or the Ed Show on MSNBC for the nightly news. The said cannot be said for much of the programming on FoxNews that intentionaly packages their opinion programs in the format of a news broadcast.
Of course they are free to package their opinion shows however they want, but it can have serious consequences. When these consequences arise because of mistaken identity of the programming, they are quick to claim they are only enterainment shows, not news shows. But, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, and they are the ones making it walk and quack, it is hard to see how they can deny culpability. Of course anytime anybody complains, FoxNews just blames either the liberal media or anti-conservatives instead of actually looking at their own actions.
If you want politically unbiased news, at least as much as possible, you pretty much have to ignore the US sources as they are all owned by just a handful of people with their own agendas. It doesn't matter whether it is CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC. Same with the print media.
I forget who said it, but it is true, if you want to control a people, you control the information they receive. Of course that used to be applied to totalitarian governments. Today, it is the Rupert Murdochs of the world.
Every day I listen to All Things Considered on NPR, and Special Report with Bret Baier on Fox, and I read Al Jazeera, NY Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. I always have my ear out for differences in news coverage. 75% of the time there is no discernible difference between them. The rest of the time the selection and tone of stories do reflect bias with NPR biased left, Fox biased right, NY Times biased very left, and Aj Jazeera mostly unbiased unless the subject of the story is the Middle East. The WSJ news pages seem to me to be the cleanest & straightest in the USA, despite Murdoch's ownership.
I conclude that all the thunder is not because of Fox New's news, but their opinion shows. If those opinion shows were split on a separate Fox Opinion channel, I suspect that much of the furor would die. I also suspect that many of those complaining loudly about Fox's news coverage don't spend much time listening to their main news ( Special Report with Bret Baier). NPR too has highly opinionated and biased shows like Tell Me More and Latino USA, but criticism of those doesn't bleed over to NPRs news reporting.
I used to enjoy it greatly when Juan Williams would appear on NPR and explain the right's position to liberal listeners, and then appear on Fox the same day to explain the left's position to conservative listeners. He did both very well. For that he got crucified because donors to public radio can't stand an on-air NPR employee who is not liberal.
To me it is more insidious to mislabel opinion as news. It is a greater sin. On that count alone, admitting 90% of what is dished out in MSNBC is opinion is very honest,
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
From what I've seen, both MSNBC and Fox are both pretty much all opinion all the time, to the point of being detrimental rather than useless as sources of news.
Right, but thankfully we don't have to rely on your opinion of what you've seen. This source found that 90% of MSNBC programming is opinion versus 55% of Fox News. So, in fact, MSNBC is pretty much opinion all the time and Fox News is pretty much opinion half the time.
They are all 100% gossip, celebrity & otherwise. There has been no Real(tm) reporting since Walter Cronkite, Huntley & Brinkley, & the like...
A key difference is: MSNBC backs its opinions with facts.
Fox backs both its opinions and news with deliberate distortions, omissions and lies.
...Or, maybe the stupid and gullible just gravitate to Fox New. Two studies have shown that people who watch Fox New propaganda are less informed then people who watch no news at all. Also, Fox News has gone top court to prove they have the "right" to misinform viewers.
Thank you for saying that before me. I've explained to my students in poli sci 101 that the concept of the news being unbiased and truthful is a late 20th century idea screed by baby boomers who look back on their childhood with painful rose tinted looks to avoid reality. It doesn't help that most news is now concentrated ina a handful of expensive medias and that most bloggers and internet sites are aggrating services (I.e. /.) which is an issue as the idea that this or that new is more truthful is complicated and just breeds issues.
I'm a far-left liberal and I prefer news that agrees with me. I admit it, it's why I watch MSN and frequent other places that make sense. I will say this though MSNBC and CNN work to play stories in a semi-neutral fashion or atleast offer a moderated bias. Fox has no such filter, they go out of their way to lie and create innuendo. But if you know you work through it which is why this false ideal is so frustrating to deal with.
Except that every Fox story is something like "Is Barack Obama the antichrist?" or "Do Democrats want to kill your grandmother?" or "Are liberals spineless cowards?" or "Is global warming actually good for you?"
It may be that they only answer the question with opinion and not facts 55% of the time, but 99% of their headlines are in that form, "asking a question" to make a statement.
Imagine I brought you on a show, and you didn't know what for, and then you found out the discussion of that episode was "Have you stopped beating your wife?" You can answer the question in a non-biased way, but the question was asked in a biased and leading way. MSNBC answers their questions in a biased way, absolutely, but the last time I checked(and admittedly it's been many years since I was a regular viewer), they were still asking real questions.
I turned on MSNBC just a minute ago. The question on the screen said "Can Mark Sanford win over family-values Republicans?" Then I turned on Fox. The question on the screen said "Automatic gun ban fail: Did the press pass on the news?" One of those is a real question, and one of those seems to be trying to put an answer in your head.
F for critical reading.
What do you think the purpose of those two sentences was?
The point was that even "news" items can (and often are) presented in an opinionated way.
Basically, MSNBC has 90% opinion programs and 10% opinionated news, Fox has 55% opinion programs and 45% opinionated news; they're both still 100% opinion.
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I love conserva-ACs who make it sound like liberalism is awash in this country. The corporate voices promote a fairly conservative corporate view. It's just liberal sounding because fairness and progressive views promote populism which is a fundamental part of democracy (Hence why they are called Democrats..)
Did you even read what he was replying to? He said:
But just because it's labelled news doesn't make it not opinion.
And so therefore one explanation here is that MSNBC are being honest about when opinion is broadcast. Whereas Fox broadcast opinion and CALL it news.
Since the article looks at what's labeled "opinion" or "commentary", just because one has more labeled opinion doesn't mean the stuff labeled news isn't opinon.
In result, news has turned into circus style entertainment. Tabloids, "people news"?
Also people are slowly start to accept selective reality offered by different media channels. Fox News gives reasoning behind Tea Party/Republican struggle, MSNBC gives more of left angle (although everyone saying they both equal in BS levels need reality check - Fox News quite frequently invents facts form their opinions, I have rarely seen it in left leaning media and they also admit mistakes). In nutshell, it is easier to live in the world where you know you're right (and there's hugely popular tv channel for you to say so).
I see it as notion that people are tired to make sense out of this world. As facts and objective reality clashes more and more with their POV, they retreat to their radical positions.
I think we are "admit you are wrong, and that's the end my friend" society/civilization.
p.s. I get facts from BBC/Reuters/other news agencies, and opinions from Daily Show/Colbert Report (despite being Dem leaning both are heavily critical about them too).
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
If you think Pew Reaearch is credible, let me introduce you to Adria Richards.
You could just get a plastic cling printed with "Opinion" and put it in the lower right corner. Or better yet, use one of the plastic clings printed with Mike or Joel and the Bots that occasionally come in MST3K DVDs. I have one on my mirror in the bathroom.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The article is painfully misleading. MSNBC gets put into the opinion category if they are interviewing people. Because they seem to focus a majority of their day on politics on the national level while Fox splits their daily broadcast a bit more evenly but all news skews towards conservative views Pew made a strange judgment call. Which is honestly OK, that's why Pew's research is wonderful but highly bias simply because it is making unquantified calls on such things as interviews and such. Even if the thoughts given in such an interview are truthful or at least honest speculation it moved the bar from "factual" to "opinion" while Fox routinely displays the demagoguery of the right wing.
At this point it's a waste of breath but at least I know why Pew is questionable in their decisions on this particular issue.
I agree in an overall way but in the nuanced sense if I gathered a roundtable of liberals and conservatives and they discussed during traditional news hours the topic of the day instead of reading it from a prompter Pew would call that "opinion." But if Fox makes inaccurate appearing to be factual statements or half-truths as we would call them by using single caster and a desk it gets classified as news. It's more an issue of format than anything else. Fox pretends to be news, MSNBC is more openly a discussion news network.
I can't watch either MSNBC or Fox. They're insipid sniping at each other is beyond tiresome. Get a room and make out. No one cares which of you has a more turgid member.
Do I like CNN? I "can" watch it but I generally choose not to watch any of them because this is the 21st century and I have the interwebs. Why would I waste my time watching cable news when I can snap up twice the information in half the time on a webpage? No talking heads. No commercials you have to wait through. No endlessly repeated stories that must be patiently waited through linearly.
If I don't like a story on a website, I skip it. Bam... next story. I can skip to the section I want and avoid the ones I don't.
There's no competition.
This whole fight over who is better at cable news is just a contest between two dinosaurs that mostly serve people in nursing homes. And that's for fox, msnbc, and cnn. Who watches them? It's all crap.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I dont care if you are a Republitard Just admit it openly.
For Christ sake. That is the fraud being perpetrated here.
No, he's not the anti-Christ - but MSNBC would have you believe that he's the messiah.
You a) don't dispute they're propaganda, b) don't dispute they tried to recruit Petraeus for president, c) you don't dispute the head of Fox News offered Petraeus Fox News as his propaganda mouthpiece.
It's very telling that you find the truth so unpleasant, but you really need to face it.
I turned on MSNBC just a minute ago. The question on the screen said "Can Mark Sanford win over family-values Republicans?" Then I turned on Fox. The question on the screen said "Automatic gun ban fail: Did the press pass on the news?" One of those is a real question, and one of those seems to be trying to put an answer in your head.
An outsider's (Australian) perspective: Most media coverage of firearms incidents and legislation is excellent material for studying propaganda efforts. The steadfast refusal of many media outlets to report defensive use of firearms and the outright distortion of facts when it comes to the effectiveness of gun control is so blatant that it defies credibility that it is anything other than deliberate. IMO it is a valid topic to report.
I have seen Australia used as an example of effective gun control by the US pro gun control lobby and as an example of ineffective gun control by the US pro gun lobby. Neither tells the truth and both are selective of the facts they are willing to report. Either side could easily find facts that don't support their agenda but they don't. Here's the reality: for a news service to be useful you need to understand their bias. The stories they choose and how they present them will be influenced by that no matter how objective they try to be. Political news should always be understood as spin, even when it exposes someone else's spin. The news tells you what powerful people want you to believe and stuff they don't care if you know about.
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Fox News wanted to compete with CNN, but replacing the unmistakable Columbia School of Journalism campus oriented idealogical compass that pervaded all existing television news sources.
Since they didn't want to just pretend to be objective from a different imagined centre-point, they attempted to structure it such that there would be discrete news and opinion. Since it is virtually impossible to go into any depth in 'news' without ending up spouting your own opinions, as soon as they moved non-trivially from the basic facts of a news-story, instead of having the anchor bloviate with faned-objectivity they ask for the opinions of two or more expressly opinionated people on the matter.
They, of course, made a lot of mistakes in their infancy, (which were mocked to death), but as they evolved, and won viewers, they have developed a relatively sane and straightforward way of disseminating the parameters and points of the mainstream discussion, as was their attempt, in most of their lineup. (They additionally have some programming which does not at all follow this format, but is very successful, so was never forced to evolve along with the network. And I don't just mean Hannity; there is truly no other medium on the planet which could broadcast/host Red Eye, which comes across as sort of strange mutated hybrid of QI, The Colbert Show and Shock radio.)
You guys slime Fox by citing:
With enemies and critics like the above, Fox must be doing something very good. Using the sources cited above as "proof" Fox is bad is about like using Rush Limbaugh as "proof" that all Democrats are evil.... well... since we're playing this stupid little game, I guess it's now settled: We now have proof all Democrats are evil anti-American Anti-Human race murdering cannibalistic sexual deviant drug using monsters - Just listen to Limbaugh! You agree right? A biased source said it about the people he did not like so we have PROOF!
See how stupid you are being? You are like a bunch of Hitler Youth or Komsomol members who have been trained to only listen to the "party line" and trained to hate and avoid any alternate viewpoints; you guys on the left think you are "free thinkers" but the dirty little truth is that your minds are welded shut.
If you are getting your news from a video source, you've probably already lost.
(As to print sources, you are on your own to figure out which one of those has good information, but at least you are more likely to be looking at news and not entertainment. )
On the other hand, if you are looking for "news as entertainment," and of the big three will fill your needs. Just don't expect good information.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Fox at least gives their political people (who they admit are right-leaning) shows that are clearly separated from their news shows (O Reilly and Hannity are on shows separated from shows run by Chris Wallace, Shep Smith, etc)
CBS is so hostile to the right that one of its most-famous news anchors fabricated a story against a Republican president and aired it right before an election
ABC is so warped to the left that they think a Clinton campaign man (who went on to serve as Clinton's White House chief of staff) is an honest middle-of-the-road "unbiased" moderator/NEWS show host
PBS is government-funded propaganda that is beholden to the Democrats for its funding. Their idea of "balance" used to be to put liberal talker Mark Shields up against Rhino-presented-falsley-as-conservative Gerkin
The NBC/MSNBC machine is so lunatic left that they keep getting caught editing recordings that they present to their audiences as unedited. The Florida shooting 9-11 call is only the most-famous. There was the edit that mislead viewers into thinking gun owners heckled a grieving father, the edit that removed any view of a black man's skin out so that a black Tea Party guy with a gun was portrayed as a rabid white racist Tea partier with a gun, (to feed their anti tea party propaganda agenda) etc. When they are not editing tapes they seem to enjoy simply faking the news, for instance, by rigging a truck to blow up so they could convince their viewers (who they clearly believe are stupid dupes) that the truck was defective, having a reporter canoe through a flooded street (with a low cam angle to keep the audience from seeing who shallow the water actually was), etc.
The CNN people are so phony that they run stories related to America with a VERY different "spin" inside the US from what they say outside the US...very like the communications model used by the PLO. They probably hope no Americans will go overseas and notice. This is the network that made a deal with Saddam to not tell the truth about him so they could have people on the ground for "exclusive" reporting during the war. Anybody who puts a leftwing dingbat like Fareed Zakaria and a person like Soledad (with left-wing talking points actually physically in her hand during an interview) Obrien onto their network without an equal number of people at least as far to the right is incapable of even recognizing "the middle" or "balance". It's laughable that Fox haters tried to hang the UK phone hacking scandal on the US Fox News team (which had nothing but a common corporate ownership) but don't mind that a person actually implicated in that hacking (Piers Morgan), and who got fired for his journalistic deception in England, is on CNN lecturing Americans that their Constitution is obsolete and that Bible many of them believe in needs to be edited (let's see this jerk try using fake photos to attack the Obama's policies or try making nightly attacks on the Koran with demands that all the nasty bits get cut-out... THAT might finally be a little balance at CNN but he and they are too gutless for THAT)
NONE of the non-Fox networks will report ANYTHING critical about the Democrats generally, or Obama specifically, unless the negative thing is that they are not being far-enough-left. Without Fox, people would not know much (or perhaps anything) about the Border Patrol agent gunned down by a Mexican drug gang armed by Obama, details about the death of an American ambassador in Libya (first such death in decades), would not know that President Obama is the first President in many decades to be so incompetent that he has broken the law and not even offered a budget before both the House and Senate wrote theirs (he is supposed to write his and send it to them as guidance). These other networks have also avoided stories about the president breaking the law (a law he himself signed, no less) in not providing the required info to congress about where all the "stimulus" money went, violated the Constitution by declaring the Senate to be in recess when
"The fact that MSNBC has more opinion shows than FoxNews is not the point. MSNBC doesn't format their programming so their opinion shows appear to be news shows"
Neither does fox. Hannity (clearly firmly on the right) has a plainly editorial show of his own. OReilly (on the right on some things but clearly stuck in the confused and muddled middle on many things) has a plainly editorial show of his own. Stossel (clearly a blatant Libertarian who favors legal drug use, gay marriage, legal prostitution, etc) has his own clearly editorial and biased show. These shows are all clearly separate from the solid news programs run by Shep Smith, Chris Wallace, Bret Baier, etc which have less spin in them than most of the stuff on other networks. There are other shows on fox which have more fluffy human interest content or which focus on particular stories rather than the daily headlines which are hosted by people like Neil Cavuto or Greta Van Susteren etc which tend to take a "conventional or traditional" view of things like law and money which modern far-left people see as right-leaning NOW but which used to be the positions that all Americans Rep and Dem used to agree on.
Fox gets ridiculed for hiring attractive women, but the thing that's actually interesting is that so many of the talking heads and reporters on Fox are people with law degrees... seems like a bunch of the men, and possibly HALF the women on the channel (who the left dismiss as airheads), are actually sharp lawyers (people like Greta and Megyn Kelly, etc) which might be why they are good at digging into what politicians say and do... a useful trait for any actual journalist to have.
If you tune-in to Fox and you cannot tell the difference between the editorial shows and the news shows, then you've got to be a moron... and you should surf back to MSNBC where they are expecting you as one of their handful of important viewers...
Except that every Fox story is something like "Is Barack Obama the antichrist?" or "Do Democrats want to kill your grandmother?" or "Are liberals spineless cowards?" or "Is global warming actually good for you?"
It may be that they only answer the question with opinion and not facts 55% of the time, but 99% of their headlines are in that form, "asking a question" to make a statement.
That is a testable assertion on the web and video. It looks to me that you get both points wrong in both forms of media.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
"I turned on MSNBC just a minute ago. The question on the screen said "Can Mark Sanford win over family-values Republicans?" Then I turned on Fox. The question on the screen said "Automatic gun ban fail: Did the press pass on the news?" One of those is a real question, and one of those seems to be trying to put an answer in your head."
You are probably a liberal. By taking a shallow view and only paying attention to the headlines (which have ALWAYS been part marketing splash on TV, on Radio and even in Print... just dig-up and ask William Randolph Hearst) and not paying attention to the details, you missed the meat of both stories and ended-up with a screwed-up opinion.
The Mark Sanford question is valid and real (whether a vapid dishonest politician who trashed his own family can get "family values" Republican voters to support him) but the headline is propaganda against "family values Republicans" intended to paint them as hypocrites. The truth is that many will because they will fear that even HE is not as bad as the Democrat they will eventually be fighting against...so they won't be hypocrites so much as they'll be choosing the lesser of two evils. This question is leaded to put "Republicans are hypocrites on 'family values'" into your head... and get a liberal audience to "stay tuned" for the details.
The Question about whether the rest of the press reported properly on the gun ban fail is also valid and real (Fox has been, for many months now, pointing out news items that other networks are not even telling their viewers about... NBC, IIRC, spent something like 10 seconds IN ONE YEAR on the Obama administration sale of assault weapons to drug gangs that lead to a dead American border patrol agent and hundreds of dead Mexicans) You are right to suspect that the headline is sensational. Automatic weapons have been illegal in the US for decades, except for a few special people with special permits and training (something all the other channels routinely mislead their viewers about). The headline suggests that the other news outlets are suppressing things... something regular Fox viewers have seen exposed time and time again. The question is further valid for a Fox audience because the other networks have been so Democrat-friendly and have been DEMANDING more gun control to the point of it having become a nightly rant consuming HOURS of airtime at places like CNN... so they are not so very keen to point out that Democrats chose not to move it through a Democrat-run Senate. The Fox headline you cite is intended to put "other channels probably still lying to their audiences about Obama's attempted gun-grab" into your head... in order to get you to "stay tuned" to see the answer.
News outlets were going "over the top" with headlines like this 200 years ago... our founders assumed we would be smart enough people to read lots of stuff from competing sources AND they assumed there would be lots of competing sources, as opposed to what news had degraded into between about 1965 and the mid-90's where the Democrats had it all. Now that we have ONE news channel (and not even a broadcast channel at that) that does not line-up in group-think with the Democrats and all their mindless minions at the other channels, the entire left is freaking-out and screaming that Fox is evil and corrupt and biased and demanding that it is illegitimate and nobody should watch it. The Obama administration tried to freeze it out and they tried to use the power of the presidency to get the rest of the news outlets to shun Fox (something so warped not even Nixon stooped that low).
The left in America used to say they wanted people with "open minds" to read, watch, and listen to EVERYTHING, and PARTICULARLY all the stuff that anybody told them not to consume. Now that they are the establishment, they insist that nobody should pay attention to or read or listen to or watch stuff that is critical of them. If somebody they do not like speaks, they call him/her a racist or a big
... where ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, NPR, NYT, PBS, and WaPo refuse to admit that they are lefties. Less true on MSNBC and left-wing talk radio where they generally pretend that a hard-left is "forward" or just "liberal". Untrue about Fox which is center-right (NONE of their views are significantly to the right of Jack Kennedy, one of the most popular and Famous Democrats in history.) Your statement is completely false when it comes to right-leaning talk radio where hosts have routinely and loudly bragged about being the "most conservative" or the "most right-wing".
If you are a Democrat and you are outraged that I likened the positions of Fox to those of JFK, you need to face the following FACTS:
I could go on and on.... but the real question that must be addressed is this: Have the Republicans moved so far to the right, and are they and Fox some new radical right-wing extreme, or have the Democrats gone so far over to the extreme left that they would despise JFK as a right-wing bigot and homophobe who was too radical-right to be allowed to even speak and to far to the right to even run as a Republican presidential candidate? The fact the you guys on the left went insane and embraced all sorts of radical stuff, moving further and further left, does not in any way obligate the rest of us to move further left with you to preserve the status-quo distance between us; If we are still standing where we were standing, we have not become any "more" of anything than we used to be.
Fox opinions usually tend to be vicious personal attacks and unsubstantiated innuendoes--and sometimes outright lies. MSNBC opinions are presented in a much more civilized manner, and are less often blatant distortions of the facts.
Doug Jensen
Fuck the news. All news sucks.
It's just a talking head reading press releases from political and business groups no matter what channel it is on.
Why Headline and Breaking News are offshoots of NBC and CNN bowadays is a great look back in time to when MTV basically stopped featuring music. The brands have been so watered down with opinions people can trust, the best altrnative these companies see is to create secondary outfits where they do more of what they used to beforeâ" tell the news. Local affiliates and national broadcasts make it even harder for them to be relevant as reporters. The slick punditry has found its fans, and the ratings are incredible. What is weird is how much the viewership of MSNBC just wants to watch Locked Up/prison documentary all night. One thing is for sure, you have to enjoy getting super angry about the 'other side' to even watch these channels frequently, but that's what they're in the business of doing. Making sport and tragedic poetry out of squares and headlines. Kimmel and Falllon are like their comedic counterparts more or less.
Once upon a time, Keith Olbermann, the guy who almost single-handedly brought MSNBC to prominence, could truthfully say that MSNBC was a balanced network. And he himself was harshly critical of Obama on several occasions, as was Cenk Uygur, and Dylan Ratigan, and Ed Schultz.
Notice a pattern there? These four guys--the voices most critical of Obama from the left--are all gone or marginalized on the network, to be replaced by either passionless wonks or Obama kiss-asses like Sharpton and much of The Grio crowd. Look up Cenk Uygur's account of how he was "let go" and you find that the MSNBC execs made a conscious decision to court favor with the Obama admin for greater "access", and toning down Uygur was part of that implicit deal. (The last press conference form O's first term started with questions to NBC and then MSNBC reporters.) ...or you could just marvel at the "Lean Forward" commercials which promote the network's new creed while showing you a love-letter montage of ecstatic Obama voters from last year's election-night victory.
that you did not answer any point I raised with anything but hot air... perhaps you get all your news from Jon Stewart or MSNBC and you did not know any if the things I mentioned
MSNBC is clear that they have opinion shows. Fox shows opinion segments and labels them news. It is right there in the name: Fox News (55% opinion.) The amount of news or opinion is irrelevant. It's the labeling that matters.
F for critical thinking. You found yourself confronted with information that does not fit the pre-ordained schema in your head and so, without any data to back your position up, you declare that all is as you believed before because the study by serious people failed to consider your prejudice that there is no way MSNBC could be worse than Fox, so they must be just as bad. That is,
MSNBC has 90% opinion programs and 10% opinionated news, Fox has 55% opinion programs and 45% opinionated news; they're both still 100% opinion
Citation needed.
I have little respect for nearly all pundits on TV.
You should learn some journalism. Or work in TV. They don't pick pundits by their quality but by their entertainment value and secondly for their idiotic "fairness bias." Go look that term up.
Roger Ailes made Reagan into the pseudo prophet he is today.
Fox is not owned by Roger Ailes; he runs it. sigh...
Chris Matthews doesn't nullify my point at all. That twit is what we've got for "smart" journalism today (generally speaking.) Even if he tries to up his game he can't pull it off - he is corporate controllable; like Howard Beale in the Network, but less entertaining.
DON'T WATCH TV NEWS. it is so poor it should not be allowed to be called news. They filter the news wire (which does the actual work for little money) for things that will get ratings AND what is related to sponsors or corporate partners. I knew a local news editor for TV, he quit and I know why he quit. The collapse has been so gradual Americans no longer have a clue. Hell, studies more show college freshman don't know fact from opinion! Fox only lowered things for TV, it was already unacceptable before them.
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