Fox News Ad Says That CNN Is Partisan

In a feat of heroic irony, Fox News published an ad promoting itself that called CNN a partisan network. It is beyond me how they could have completed work on the ad with all the laughing that one would expect to ensue. But they did complete it and it was printed in several newspapers including the Washington Post and News Corp. sister pub, the Wall Street Journal.

The ad relied on data from a Pew study on news audience segmentation. Fox managed to thoroughly misrepresent the results of the survey, and consequently misinform anyone reading the ad. This, of course, is nothing new for Fox who daily misinform their viewers.

The Fox ad highlighted Pew’s finding that 51% of CNN viewers were Democrats and 18% were Republicans. By comparison, 39% of Fox viewers were Republicans and 31% Democrats. From these findings Fox concluded that they were more balanced. Presumably they surmise that the closer the distribution of viewers by party affiliation, the more balanced the coverage. The problem is that balance in viewership is not a measure of balance in news content. Any serious, objective analyst would concede that the content on Fox News is heavily weighted to conservative views. Fox executives Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes have as much as admitted it when they assert that Fox was designed to counter what they believed to be a liberal bias in their competition. It should come as no surprise that such a deliberately partisan enterprise would attract more conservatives and Republicans. And that’s exactly what the Pew numbers reveal, despite Fox’s efforts to misconstrue them.

Left out of the Fox ad was the fact that the 39% of Fox viewers identifying themselves as Republicans is approximately double the amount of every other news network, not just CNN. That disparity alone is revealing. And the 33% of Fox viewers identifying themselves as Democrats is the lowest of all the news networks by a considerable margin.

However the most salient fact to arise from this information is that the ratio of Republicans to Democrats on Fox (39(R) to 31(D)) is the exact inverse of the general population (39(D) to 32(R)).

So the truth is, Fox News is not only not “balanced,” it is the opposite of the profile of American voters. It is the network that is the least representative of the public. And from that they want us to conclude that they are fair and balanced? Sure, CNN’s 51% is an overweighting of Democrats. But at least it reflects the correct majority tilt in the population. The fact that Fox slants its coverage so far to the right explains both its upside down representation of Republicans to Democrats and the exodus of Democrats from Fox to the other networks.

It’s not enough that Fox manipulates the Pew study for their self-serving ads, they are also using it to attack the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart. At a press gathering in Denver, Stewart told reporters that Fox’s “fair and balanced” slogan is an insult “to people with brains” and that he was “stunned to see Karl Rove on a news network as an analyst.” An anonymous flack at Fox (even their PR people are afraid to identify themselves) responded by saying that Stewart was “out of touch” and cited their skewed take on the Pew study as support. But then they went further to deliver a gratuitous and immaterial zinger:

“But being out of touch with mainstream America is nothing new to Jon, as evidenced by the crash-and-burn ratings of this year’s Oscars telecast.”

According to Fox, the ratings of a strike-hobbled awards show is now the measure of Stewart’s ability to connect with mainstream America. Never mind the unprecedented success of the Daily Show. And never mind the fact that Fox News has been been bleeding viewers for the past two years and is growing slower than any of their competitors. For a network that is so demonstrably out of touch, as illustrated above, they shouldn’t be flinging insults at Jon Stewart. They may come to regret that.

As an added plus to this deceptive advertisement from Fox, notice that they are using the elephant logo of the Republican Party in the ad. I assume they are not aware that the Republicans have asserted their copyright protection of that image and have threatened to sue those who use it without permission. I wonder if the Party will sue Fox News for this flagrant infringement. I’m guessing they won’t since Fox is a de facto division of the Republican Party anyway.

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One thought on “Fox News Ad Says That CNN Is Partisan

  1. Yeah, I blogged on this myself.

    While the distribution of party affiliation is interesting, the real issue is what do the viewers think. A poll Fox News won’t publicize is a Rasmussen Reports poll showing what Fox News viewers think. As I wrote:

    “Rasmussen Reports ran a poll showing a whopping 87% of Fox News viewers plan to vote for McCain. A minuscule 14% of Fox News viewers have a favorable opinion Barack Obama. A microscopic 9% would vote for Obama.”

    Voters cross party lines each election cycle and it appears conservative Democrats (or PUMAs) who prefer McCain tune into Fox News for a daily dose of propaganda to justify their viewpoint.

    Case in point, right now I’m watching Fox & Friends using a body language expert to analyze Obama’s “anger” and fear (when mentioning McCain) which followed a segment bashing Jimmy Carter. “Fair and balance”? You bet. 😉

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