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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."
Yeah, take that Pew! If your puny "facts" don't agree with my bias, then you're total assholes and must be dismissed!!
That seems pretty useless if it doesn't also measure how often the purported news is incorrect or biased.
Opinion is always biased.
The current generation doesnt seem to know what journalism used to be, and apparently cannot seem to tell the difference between facts and opinions.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
Of course. But what the OP was talking about is the parts not marked as opinion, but the reporting parts, which should be as objective as possible. What the OP questioned is how much of that reporting is actually biased, and thus not truly reporting (he also questioned how much of it is simply incorrect, which is already a strong hint he wasn't talking about the opinion part).
And yes, it's not really possible to be 100% objective even in reporting, but good reporting goes as close to that as possible. Biased reporting, on the other hand, is worse than marked opinion, because it makes the opinion look like hard facts.
In German public TV they once had a very nice demonstration of this: They purposefully made two oppositely biased "documentations" about the same East-German city (the report was a short time after the German re-unification). Both of them reported only hard facts, yet one of them painted the picture of a declining city which was essentially doomed, while the other one told the story of a booming city with a great future. And both did do it in a quite convincing way.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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.
What I've noticed is that on opinion shows Fox will get a liberal and conservative to argue the issue and the commentator for Fox and the conservative will gang up on the liberal.
On MSNBC they get a liberal and a hardcore liberal to discuss an issue and they and the commentator engage in a circle jerk for the whole segment.
No, it really isn't. If someone is reading the New York Times or the Washington Times, his political standing is pretty obvious.
Ditto MSNBC vs. Fox News. Or NPR vs. just about anything else on Talk Radio.
The difference is that a lot of people refuse to acknowledge they are biased, or don't realize it.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.