As a simple Canadian watching the US elections from afar, I can't help but wonder... isn't there some sort of journalism standard required in US law/regulations to call oneself a "News" program?
I mean... I realize that the people who frequent these forums are somewhat left-leaning, but the content I'm seeing coming out of Fox news (along with everything I've ever heard about them anecdotally) makes it pretty clear that they are pretty much just a GOP propaganda machine, and often (I can't say always due to insufficient information) provide views on issues that are so spectacularly one-sided that it boggles my poor little mind. And it seems like there are a whole bunch of people who watch the stuff religiously and aren't even aware that there might be some other points of view out there worth listening to.
So yeah, I was hoping some people with a better knowledge of US law/culture that could help tell me why they are able to pretend to be doing journalism when they're seemingly not even trying to see any more than 1 side of things. I'm sure constitutionally there are protections offered them to say whatever the heck they want, but surely we'd have the "Communist news channel", the "So you like small boys news channel", and the "GOP are a bunch of silly geese news channel" as well if things were that easy...right?
Probably not right, but I'd like help figuring out why :P
Posts
Also Fox is very fond of doing that 'We don't know if this is true, but what if it WAS?' bullshit.
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
The insidious part is that they can say bullshit on the opinion piece (Is Obama a Communist?!?) and then on the News piece say "People are saying Obama may be a Communist!" without mentioning that the only people who actually said it are.. their own network.
I doubt it will ever change, but the basic idea is that it's nearly impossible to quantify News to the point of requiring anything that calls itself news must contain X% news content. There's also a lot of bullshit allowed before lies become libel/slander in the US political(or general public figure) arena due to being a very very protected form of free speech. Fox is a media product, not News. It's News segment isn't all that atrocious and the local Fox affiliates are nowhere near as bad, but most of the good and bad attention are paid to it's opinion content.
tl;dr: Fox News is just a channel name. Fox NEWS is about an hour of programming a day that justifies the name of the channel.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
I was just thinking about creating one after a friend linked me this to make fun of: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/07/12/america-coming-civil-war
Instead it just made me angry as shit.
The bile, inaccuracy, privilege, and proud willful ignorance contained therein made me want to punch a puppy.
and I love puppies.
It's an "opinion piece" but seriously, fuck that guy.
That makes slightly more sense, I guess.
So the situation is really that there's a loophole that allows Fox to do this, and getting the loophole closed would be opposed by most right-leaning people, meaning it'll never get done unless Fox goes way out of line?
Oh okay, someone brought this up already. But yeah, there we go. Even though there's freedom of the press, I would think that slanderous and libelous material would be against the rules. Nope. Go for it, so says a poor court judgment.
Pretty much everything horrible you see linked will be from one of their opinion shows, or Shep Smith staring in horror at the shit that just came out of someone's mouth.
I feel so bad for that guy. I'd love to see how much medication he takes daily to cope.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
http://ceasespin.org/ceasespin_blog/ceasespin_blogger_files/fox_news_gets_okay_to_misinform_public.html
It's performance art. Manufactured bullshit. Beck's issue is that he takes it too far. I don't think he buys half the shit he says, he just doesn't have the same filter on him that causes him to stop saying shit. Same with the Fox and Friends producer/whoever all was involved in that campaign ad of a morning show that went over an invisible line even for Fox's standards of monetizing insanity.
Fox is the worst offender of conservatively biased "news" and shouldn't be watched by anyone. Same goes for nearly every other "news" channel out there now on American TV.
Oh, but Fox actually lost this court case? I assumed the opposite before I checked the link.
Still... just wow. O_o
And then he goes on TV demonizing the shit out of Obama.
I'm not going to say which is the 'real' Bill, because neither of those are. The real Bill is a guy who doesn't give a shit about being misleading.
Billo likes money. He will do things for money. He gets ratings for being crazy. That's all you really need to know about Bill O'Reilly.
Fox's bias is political, while other station's biases tend to be towards manufacturing crap that will get people to tune in.They're not really the liberal media that Fox likes to call them as a justification for acting the way they do.
The guy lies to people on a daily basis, and he gets paid for it. I'm sure a lot of people would love to have that privilege.
Steam
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
No, a wealthy corporation like News Corp can basically say anything it wants. Proving libel/slander under U.S. law is incredibly hard, and even if that happened they would just pay a small fine. The bigger threat is that politicians would stop giving them interviews ("controlling access"), but they're so influential that even Democrats basically have no choice but to interview with them occasionally.
Most of that "manufacturing of crap" tends to skew towards the liberal viewpoint, though. You'd be hard-pressed to find actual criticism of Obama on many of the "news" channels during any point of his term. The few times he has been criticized, its usually very lenient and handled with kid-gloves.
I consider myself as independent as they come. And watching any news channel on TV immediately gives me a headache from the obvious bias, consistent logical fallacies used to get across their agenda, and refusal to treat "their politicians" with the same microscope that they treat their opposition's.
No, there is pervasive liberal bias in the other networks. I mean, CBS tried to destroy a presidential candidate with forged documents. MSNBC is all liberals all the time. NPR has been doing a running series where they play an Obama campaign commercial, talk about how awesome he is, and then... they go on to the next news item.
Before I go curl up into the fetal position and suck my thumb trying to forget I know any of this, has anyone given any thought on how to set the USS News back on course? As a Canadian I'm used to fairly strict regulations regarding what's allowed to go on TV, but I'm going to guess that "suggesting more regulations" = "government telling me what to listen to" = "political suicide for anyone who would dare to suggest such a socialist/communist thing".
I guess hoping that someone or a group of someones who have a lot of money and are politically neutral start up a new, unbiased news channel is the answer?
Unbiased news doesn't sell.
Murdoch has created a horrible monster and in America there's no BBC to counterbalance it.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Have some evidence to support this? It seems conspiracy theory minded.
I don't even think there is such a thing as "unbiased news".
I mean, I guess you could just dryly report facts and not explain them. But that would just be confusing and frustrating to the average viewer, not to mention boring. Proper news requires some sort of analysis, and that analysis will always be called a "bias" by anyone who disagrees with it. If we had some magical truth-telling device that would be great, but as it is we're stuck with human opinions.
Rathergate is the CBS story, but the rest is kind of bollocks.
Well, I mean you can never be wholly unbiased, but you can cover both sides of a story relatively dispassionately. I think the CBC in Canada, and probably the BBC in the UK do a pretty fair job of this (of course, they're run by the government instead of individual millionnaires/corporations, so that may be why).
This is the point of the conversation where I point out the fact that Fox News viewers are the most misinformed in the nation.
Because Fox just fucking lies.
Steam
Well that isn't really why they're misinformed. It is why they stay that way.
I'm skeptical that Fox and the Republicans will have to face reality any time soon.
They've got a nice little insular zone going on.