The following article is republished with permission from
AltNet. It was authored by
Ilyse Hogue, the senior advisor at
Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group monitoring conservative media. This piece was originally titled:
One in four Americans believes "most or all" of what's said on Fox News, despite Fox's fabrication of everything from death panels to Climategate.
Rupert Murdoch's gauleiter
Consider the facts: more than twice as many Americans watch Fox News as watch CNN, the next most popular cable news channel, and almost five times as many as watch MSNBC. Fox's audience cuts across age, gender, race, education, and income level. The average Fox News viewer is a male between the ages of 30 to 49 -- far from most people's perception that mostly seniors watch Fox. So where Seddon pointed to a fabled minority audience of "not-so-bright … American citizens", Fox is instead popular among a wide swath of well-educated, contributing members of society. Fox's audience includes your neighbour, your cousin and the guy in front of you in line every morning at Starbucks.
This growing audience also puts significant faith in the credibility of the news delivered by Fox, even while trust in other major news outlets declines. Fox is among the most trusted news outlets in the US, despite countless demonstrable instances of their anchors and pundits spreading misinformation. This rise in influence is not an accident or a coincidence. It is the result of a sophisticated strategy to gain market dominance through an almost monopolistic aggregation of media platforms in individual markets, an aggressive strategy of cross-marketing between entertainment and news, and a systematic denigration by Fox News on air of all other outlets. Fox's pre-eminent position has had an irrefutable and destructive impact on the state of political discourse in the United States. Since its inception, Fox News has performed as a political party, not as an objective journalistic outlet. Since President Obama took office, Fox has succeeded not only in spreading misinformation and lies, but also in entrenching those fictions so that its audience relates to them as irrefutable fact. One in four Americans believes "most or all" of what's said on Fox News, despite Fox's fabrication of everything from death panels to Climategate. (Coined by Sarah Palin, the term "death panels" -- an inaccurate claim that the healthcare reform bill would require end-of-life counseling -- was picked up by Fox to advance the provocative and false threat that the government would "tell grandma and grandpa… how and when to die". Climategate is Fox's name for the so-called scandal in which emails -- stolen and then distorted -- from the UK's Climate Research Unit suggested that "scientists are fudging data to make their case for global warming", when the "evidence isn't really there.") Fox News' approach to these issues has, among other things, limited genuine debate about the merits of healthcare policy, forcing elected representatives to spend time insisting to their constituents that the president of the United States does not want to kill their grandmothers. The claims are so outrageous that they would be funny -- if they didn't have real impact on people's lives.
Not content to spread misinformation and singlemindedly pursue an extreme agenda, Fox decided in 2009 it would contribute explicitly to the rise of a social movement. Fox spent disproportionate airtime rallying people to join the Tea Party, the radical right group that was formed in the wake of the presidential election in 2008. Over ten days in April of 2009, Fox aired 107 ads for its coverage of Tea Party protests and, in that same time period, featured at least 20 segments on the upcoming protests. By contrast, in the recent legislative battle over collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin, Fox called the protesting union supporters a "shrieking leftist mob". By encouraging people to attend local rallies and providing incessant coverage of town halls around the healthcare bill, Fox lent structure and legitimacy to what might have otherwise been a brief episode of "tax day" anger. And as far as the 2010 midterms are concerned, both the Tea Party movement and Fox News deserve credit for the Republican sweep of the nation. What's sinister here is not the change of power -- the response of an unsatisfied American populace is, indeed, "vote another guy in" -- but the very deliberate manufacturing of that change by a force masquerading as a reputable news outlet.
The UK is currently faced with the prospect of full News Corp ownership of BSkyB. As political and opinion leaders think through what this would mean for their country, they should carefully consider not only Fox's worst instances of propagandising, but also the potential British audience for such misinformation. And, most likely, they need look no further than their flatmate. Seddon warns in Tribune that "America needs to wake up before people like Beck and his ilk has it by the throat." Let me end here with a counter-admonition: the UK needs to wake up before Murdoch and his corporation have the media -- and, by extension, British citizens -- even more in the palm of his hand than he already does.
Before more people start tuning into Beck's deceitful propaganda,
get involved!
Post a comment
All non-spam comments approved
Free speech is practiced here
------------------------------------------------------
Please get involved for 10 minutes
http://sharethisurlaboutglennbeck.com
Thank you
2 comments:
Durrr, American ain't a democracy, it's a republic, durrr.
Okay, sorry, just had to post that before somebody else did. It's just something that I have discovered Beck followers like to spout off whenever anybody says anything of democracy, they just can't seem to get the idea that it is a democratic republic, but I digress.
What I love about the defence of Fox's extreme biased outlook, is that when pointed out, most people fall back on the concept that other networks are just as misleading or anti-conservative, or pro-liberal, or pro-progressive(lol). You brought up an excellent point about Fox's differing positions of protests. I think to protest the government under G.W.Bush, you were labeled as a terrorist sympathizer, yet it all changed when Obama came to office. Yet, the Tea Party protesters don't seem to realize this. I do find it amusing that they have taken up the name "Tea Party", from my experience, "Tea Parties" are just a group of little children pretending to be grown ups. It somehow fits the protesters, okay now I'm being overly biased and un-objective, but at least I don't claim it to be factual news.
Chris, I didn't write this, and I would have stated it more like I just commented on Glenn Beck dot com: "If Beck wants to discuss "cow farts," he should get a job on a comedy show. Beck on Fox is proof that Fox is not to be taken seriously. On Fox, he threatens American democratic order."
Many people, including presidents, refer to American democracy; but yes, it's a democratic republic. We agree about that basic concept.
We also agree about the Tea Party. They have childish ideas about governance and the budget. We need deficit reduction, but the slash and burn approach being taken will only serve to undermine the recovery from the great recession. That is probably exactly what they want since that would anger voters and cause those unaware of what they have been doing since Obama was elected to vote Obama out of office in 2012.
I don't know if you're being "overly biased" since G. Will just wrote on op=ed piece in WaPo stating basically the same thing about presidential hopefuls.
Post a Comment