Fox News Propped Up By Republicans And Southerners

Posted by on August 18, 2009 at 12:35 pm. 6 Comments :

A new poll by Daily Kos/Research 2000 explores some interesting, but not entirely surprising, viewing patterns for the three top cable news networks. The poll’s most revealing results are those that break out party affiliation and regional viewing.

Overall, 25% of respondents watch Fox News at least once a week. That number includes 23% of Democrats and 14% of Independents. The obvious partisan standout is Republicans with 52% watching at least once a week. Similarly, regional viewing is heavily weighted to the south with 39% of southerners tuning in to Fox News. The rest of the nation is far less attracted to the right-wing network who draws significantly fewer viewers from the west (23%), the midwest (21%), and the northeast (13%). Also notable is the dismal performance of Fox amongst young voters (18-29) and minorities, at least 80% of whom report that they never watch Fox News. In fact, more than 50% of all of the groups of viewers (party, region, ethnicity, age) never watch Fox News, except for Republicans (38%).

Republicans and southerners are also the most sharply segmented groups in the survey when queried on viewing of CNN and MSNBC. An examination of the data shows that these two groups almost completely shut out any news source other than Fox News. To be sure, Democrats favor MSNBC and, to a lesser extent CNN, in greater numbers than other demographic breakouts, but the disparity is nowhere near as great as that for Republicans and southerners.

These numbers are essentially repeated when the question turns from viewing habits to perceptions of accuracy. The only significant variance is in the “not sure” column. For those who reported being unsure with regard to accuracy, both CNN and Fox had percentages in the low twenties. MSNBC, however, reported 60% not sure. This number probably reflects the lower distribution of MSNBC on cable outlets nationally.

The bottom line is that Republicans and the south occupy a very different country than the rest of us do. This party and regional divergence could not be more pronounced. It suggests that a case could be made that the Civil War was not a particularly constructive event. The consequence of this discord is that neither the conservative south, nor the more progressive north, west, and east, are being represented very well. Previous studies have shown these same distinctions on policy questions like health care and opinions on whether the President was a natural born U.S. citizen.

This new poll is a useful glimpse into cable news viewing habits, but I would still like to see what a Nielsen survey would show. There is ample evidence that Fox is a predominately regional network whose viewers are clustered in the south. With Nielsen data to confirm this, advertisers might alter the way they allocate their budgets. Also, cable operators might adjust their channel offerings, which could help to resolve the distribution problem that MSNBC has been hampered by.

It is truly a shame that the majority of the country is being held hostage by a minority that is pushing a Dark Ages platform that opposes universal health care, civil rights, tax fairness, and environmental protection. And it compounds the shame that an overtly biased cable news network is artificially elevated in a manner that inflates its clout so that it can further distort the political landscape.

However, one other thing needs to be taken from this survey. The numbers of respondents who say they never watch any of the cable news nets (averaging over 2/3) affirms my long held belief that far too much is made of what these networks do and say. The total viewership in primetime for the whole bunch is less than 2% of the American population. Putting that into perspective should give analysts pause when attributing any significance to what is said on cable news.

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Fox Nation Declares Victory: Health Care Edition

Posted by on August 17, 2009 at 11:35 am. 2 Comments :

This is the fifth time that the Fox Nation has declared a “victory” on their web site that is not attributable to Fox Nation nor even a victory:

Quoting me: Fox Nation has decided to make a habit of these “Mission Accomplished” moments. That stance in and of itself is evidence of Fox’s bias. They have ceased to even pretend to be a neutral news enterprise. They are now openly admitting that they have a stake in the outcomes of political affairs. And when they think their side has won, they won’t hesitate to declare victory and commence a celebration.

In addition to this overt display of bias, Fox News broadcast another episode of its long-running series of chyron “bloopers.” Normally they are satisfied with merely misidentifying the party affiliation of politicians. In almost every case the error reflects badly on Democrats. But on this occasion they have stepped up their game. By mislabeling Joe Sestak as Joke Sestak, Fox News is blatantly insulting a Democratic congressman and candidate for the Senate. I guess the next step will be to attach devil horns to the the top of every Democrat’s head and replace the audio with commie radio broadcasts.


Fox News’ Major Garrett Really Doesn’t Understand Email

Posted by on August 14, 2009 at 7:07 pm. 27 Comments :

At yesterday’s White House press briefing, Major Garrett of Fox News embarrassed himself by demonstrating his utter lack of understanding of the Internet and email. Today he is escalating his campaign to make a total ass of himself, and he is doing a magnificent job of it.

Garrett appeared on Fox News today to announce that he is pursuing White House press secretary Robert Gibbs to find out how emails, allegedly sent from the White House, were received by people who never requested them. He has even filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get to the bottom of this raging controversy. There are some rather simple and entirely innocent answers to this mystery, but Garrett can’t be bothered to investigate them. On his blog today he admitted to journalistic negligence that would make a cub reporter cringe.

“…in every instance so far, e-mailers insist the e-mail(s) they received from the White House was/were not forwarded. They are positive the e-mails arrived directly from the White House.”

“Fox cannot independently verify all of these accounts. Fox can only represent what hundreds of e-mailers have represented to me or to the network.”

So Garrett is relying on the accounts of the people who contacted him who said they were “positive” the emails came directly from the White House, but he can’t verify a single one. He is satisfied that these people whom he has never met, never questioned, never vetted, are so reliable that he is under no obligation to confirm their assertions. He produces two examples of aggrieved email recipients, one of whom complains, not of an email, but a pop-up ad containing an email from the White House. Of course, a pop-up ad cannot contain an email. It can contain ad, but Garrett didn’t verify this either and, frankly, I’m skeptical.

Click here to enlarge.
These are the people on whose “positive” assertions he was relying when filing his FOIA request. But Garrett is missing an even bigger piece of this puzzle. Apparently he never bothered to look at his very own Fox News blog on which there is a “SHARE” feature that permits anyone to send an email from that site to any other email address. And – surprise – WhiteHouse.gov has the very same feature. (see image at left)

I don’t know if Garrett is really this clueless about the Internet or if he is deliberately manufacturing a remarkably lame scandal. But before he gets himself in too deep, he may want to get former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens to explain this series of tubes to him.

For a network/party that had no problem with the Bush administration actually monitoring and reading their emails, they are sure making a big stink out of something as innocent as a contact list from which they can unsubscribe with a click.

Update: I’m curious if Garrett’s FOIA request would violate the privacy policy of the White House web site. I know that I wouldn’t want my email, or other info that I gave to WhiteHouse.gov, turned over to Fox News.

Update II: Fox News received a response from the White House regarding the mysterious emails:

“The White House email list is made up of email addresses obtained solely through the White House website. The White House doesn’t purchase, upload or merge from any other list, again, all emails come from the White House website as we have no interest in emailing anyone who does not want to receive an email. If an individual received the email because someone else or a group signed them up or forwarded the email, we hope they were not too inconvenienced. Further, we suggest that they unsubscribe from the list by clicking the link at the bottom of the email or tell whomever forwarded it to them not to forward such information anymore. We are implementing measures to make subscribing to emails clearer, including preventing advocacy organizations from signing people up to our lists without their permission when they deliver petition signatures and other messages on individual’s behalf.”

As it turns out, it was third-party organizations who entered the email addresses into the White House system, not some grand conspiracy by Obama and ACORN and Bill Ayres and the Kenyan Consulate. Who knew? Well, everyone but Major Garrett and the fraternity of Foxpods.


Media Consortium Contemplates Competiton To Nielsen

Posted by on August 14, 2009 at 12:58 pm. NO Comments :

The Financial Times is reporting that some of the top media companies are exploring options for creating an alternative to Nielsen Media’s monopolistic control of the television ratings system.

“Media participants in the consortium – including networks owned by NBC Universal, Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, CBS, Discovery and Walt Disney – expect it to be operational by September.”

Neilsen’s service has been the subject of criticism for decades. Its methodology is virtually guaranteed to misrepresent the actual TV audience. Out-of-home viewing isn’t included. This is a significant portion of the marketplace that includes offices, dorms, hotels, bars, etc. Their sampling is skewed by being limited just to those respondents who aren’t creeped out by having a device attached to their TV that records everything they watch. They do not account for cultural viewing habits where certain groups of viewers gather together to view programs. That has a disproportional impact on young and low income viewers, as well as sports fans. And the new media marketplace (i.e. digital viewing) is almost completely ignored.

So it is well past time to overhaul this archaic and inaccurate process of measuring TV usage. But don’t get too excited. I have seen at least three of these consortiums come and go. It is a high risk, low probability exercise that is almost doomed to fail before it begins.

Here is how it generally goes. The stakeholders (producers, syndicators, advertisers) come together agreeing that the status quo is untenable and something has to be done. Then they solicit prospective enterprises to fill the gaps that Nielsen is missing. The consortium promises to support the new venture and help them to develop a product that all parties will find useful. The new venture invests millions of dollars and thousands of hours in building their service. At some point they are ready to provide the consortium with sample data. In the instances that I witnessed, the new data was often in conflict with the data from Nielsen, but it was well supported and appeared to differ only because they were more accurate than Nielsen.

This is where the trouble starts. With numbers that differ from Nielsen, some parties will be up while others are down. The parties whose numbers are lower will immediately object to the new service and complain that they are not being represented properly. Then the consortium begins to collapse. As the aggrieved parties back away, the remaining members are faced with greater burdens to support the new venture because the cost is distributed between fewer players. Plus, these higher burdens come as the project is in turmoil, which makes any continued investment even more risky, and thus, less likely.

A peculiarity of the television advertising world is that these folks prefer inaccurate data to accurate data that makes them look bad. Maybe that isn’t really peculiar, just self-serving and dishonest (like that never happens in business). But it bodes ill for any enterprise that seeks to promote themselves by boasting about their accuracy.

As the consortium and the new venture have been wrestling to put together the new service, Nielsen has been busily disparaging the new venture as untested and unreliable. At the same time, they have started to adopt the methods and features of the new venture and slash their own fees to undercut the new competition.

The result is that the new venture eventually loses the necessary support to be sustainable and quietly fades away. Nielsen, after preserving their monopoly, retreats to their previous levels of poor service and unresponsiveness to their clients. And with the threat of competition removed, they inevitably increase their fees to pre-consortium levels.

At this point, there is no reason to presume that this effort will end any differently. Any business that is lured into this space had better be careful and apprise themselves of the history of these projects. I don’t doubt the sincerity of those who are promoting this initiative. But I suspect that they have little historical memory of what they are proposing and they may be a bit naive. Time will tell.


Fox Nation Declares Victory: Death Panels And Hitler Edition

Posted by on August 14, 2009 at 9:55 am. 5 Comments :

This is the fourth time that the Fox Nation has declared a “victory” on their web site that is not attributable to Fox Nation nor even a victory:

Quoting me: Fox Nation has decided to make a habit of these “Mission Accomplished” moments. That stance in and of itself is evidence of Fox’s bias. They have ceased to even pretend to be a neutral news enterprise. They are now openly admitting that they have a stake in the outcomes of political affairs. And when they think their side has won, they won’t hesitate to declare victory and commence a celebration.

However, on this occasion there was an even worse display of the repugnant character of Fox Nation. Accompanying a link to a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll, Fox Nation selected an image that illustrates perfectly the Fox doctrine of division and hatred:

Take a good look at that picture. It is no accident that the Obama as Hitler poster is the first thing that draws the eye. Yet there is no editorial connection to that visual cue. The graphic links to a poll conducted by Fox News with predictably negative results for President Obama. But the revolting context suggested by the image is affirmed in the caption:

“FNC Poll: America Sides With Town Hall Protesters.”

The inescapable conclusion is that town hall protesters regard Obama as equivalent to Hitler and that the rest of America concurs. This is not merely a snapshot of a vile assemblage of ignorant hate mongers, it is confirmation that Fox is amongst those who side with the Hitler-invoking protesters. It was Fox editors who made the decision to publish this photo that was deliberately cropped to deliver a visual message.

What makes this even more repulsive is that Fox persistently denies the allegations that the Tea Baggers who populate these town halls are racist. Yet here they plainly flaunt the transparent loathing that infects these objectionable objectors and furthermore, they exalt them as the essence of American values.

Were this just an example of photojournalism capturing a real moment in the quilt of characters that make up our nation, it would be appropriate and enlightening. But to deploy this image in this context is simply disgusting, but not surprising coming from Fox.


Robert Gibbs Nails Major Garrett Of Fox News

Posted by on August 13, 2009 at 12:58 pm. 15 Comments :

Today’s White House press briefing contained a bit of dramedy that should serve as a model for how to treat the pseudo-journalists from Fox News.

Fox’s Major Garrett was concerned about people who claim that they have received emails from presidential advisor David Axelrod despite never having signed up for any communications from the White House. Garret prefaced his question by conflating the communications activities of the White House with those of Organizing for America or other campaign operations.

Press secretary Robert Gibbs responded that the White House does not coordinate with outside political groups. Garret persisted in inquiring as to why people who have never requested these emails should be receiving them. Gibbs told him that he could not speculate as to the source of the emails and that he would be happy to check to see if the recipients were on the White House list. Here is where Garrett went off the rails. In a fit of disbelief he pressed Gibbs:

Garrett: “I need to give you these peoples’ email so you can check them on a list?”

Garrett was clearly implying that this was some sort of scam to harvest more names for White House propaganda. Gibbs responded that he couldn’t possibly know if these people received email from the White House if he didn’t know who to look for on their list. Indeed, how could Gibbs know the origin of the emails without seeing the email? These emails could very well have been received originally by people who did sign up for them and then forwarded them to their friends and family. The secondary recipients may be the people who contacted Garrett. How could Gibbs know?

Garrett somehow takes this as a personal affront and insists that he has received emails with this complaint. He implies that Gibbs is calling him a liar. Of course Gibbs never disputed that Garret received complaints, it’s just that he still has no idea where the emails came from and is only trying explain to this to Garrett (who, by the way, also has no idea where the emails came from).

Undaunted, Garrett continues to pester Gibbs even though he cannot provide any additional substance. And he seems not to have even the most rudimentary understanding of email and how it can be forwarded. So when Garret winds up for his next pitch, Gibbs lets him have it:

Gibbs: Let me go someplace else that might be constructive.

That’s telling him. And that response would work exceedingly well for ANY encounter with Fox News. During much of this exchange, Garrett had a look of utter surprise on his face. He seemed to be shocked that Gibbs was not clairvoyant. And he also seemed to be dismayed at what he perceived as a dismissive tone from Gibbs. But anyone listening to this dialogue would agree that Gibbs would be justified in being dismissive.

Garrett, like the rest of the Fox News cabal, is overtly partisan. Most people believe that the obvious right-wing bias at Fox is limited to the primetime shouters like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and daytime’s Glenn Beck. But Garrett is the author of “The Enduring Revolution: The Inside Story of the Republican Ascendancy and Why It Will Continue.” That book was published in 2005. Its obvious partisanship is matched only by how monumentally wrong is its premise.

Look for Garrett to file a report that disparages Gibbs and accuses him of both avoiding the question and snubbing the questioner. Garrett’s pals at Fox News will probably also jump on this as an opportunity to whack the White House. But I would advise the President, and anyone contemplating an encounter with Fox News, to heed the advice of Robert Gibbs and “go someplace else that might be constructive.”

Update: For reference, the Axelrod email actually requests that it be forwarded:

“So let’s start a chain email of our own. At the end of my email, you’ll find a lot of information about health insurance reform, distilled into 8 ways reform provides security and stability to those with or without coverage, 8 common myths about reform and 8 reasons we need health insurance reform now.”

“Right now, someone you know probably has a question about reform that could be answered by what’s below. So what are you waiting for? Forward this email.”

The subject line for the email is: “Something worth forwarding.”

Follow up report posted 8/14/09: Garrett was on Fox News this morning to prove that he still doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand that anyone can forward emails to anyone else. People can also go online and enter someone else’s email address into an email request form. Many sites, including the White House and Fox News (click to view), have a “share this” feature where people put in email addresses of their friends and family. Garrett needs to get former Sen. Ted Stevens to explain the series of tubes to him.

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Bill O’Reilly’s Journalistic Standards Revealed – Again

Posted by on August 13, 2009 at 10:13 am. 3 Comments :

Bill O’Reilly has indeed proven again and again that he has no journalistic standards. It is becoming somewhat tedious having to point this out when it occurs with such frequency, but this latest example just cries out for attention. I’m going to let O’Reilly tell the story himself…

“Sources tell ‘The Factor’ that there is a federal investigation underway to find out if any American company sold components for roadside bombs to nefarious people. In May of 2008, and again in October ’08, coalition forces discovered unexploded roadside bombs in Iraq and handed them over to the FBI bureau in Baghdad. The FBI discovered that radio frequency modules inside the bombs were part of a shipment made by a U.S. company to Corezing International, a business in Singapore with direct ties to Iran.”

Oh my. That’s sounds frightening. Do go on…

“According to authorities, these modules are still being used today to kill Americans. The FBI will not comment, and ‘The Factor’ believes the investigation may be classified, because information is very hard to come by.”

So I assume that “The Factor” dove in and conducted a thorough investigation to get the “hard to come by” information, carefully documenting the exploits of a corrupt and dangerous program that is threatening American soldiers and America’s interests…

“‘The Factor’ has been told, but cannot confirm, that the General Electric corporation is under suspicion in the case.”

Ummm…..If you’ve been told something that you can’t confirm, why are you reporting it? You know, I’ve been told that Bill O’Reilly fixes breakfast in bed for Osama Bin Laden every Sunday morning before going to Mosque together. I can’t confirm it, but…..

“To be clear, ‘The Factor’ is not accusing anyone of anything. We are just reporting what we believe to be true.”

You aren’t accusing anyone of anything? Unless I’m mistaken, you just accused General Electric of arming America’s enemies and killing American troops. You made the accusation despite not being able to confirm it. And “reporting what we believe to be true” isn’t reporting at all, it’s gossip. So your assertion that you aren’t making an accusation is contradicted in the very same sentence by your admission to being a gossip monger (see Antilogical Reasoning).

Needless to say, O’Reilly got it all wrong. GE responded calling O’Reilly’s allegations “irresponsible and maliciously false” GE’s spokesman, Gary Sheffer, said that GE doesn’t do business with Corezing, and they don’t even make the radio frequency modules to which O’Reilly referred. Sheffer continued…

“We usually do not respond to the misleading and inaccurate claims made on this program because very few people take them seriously, but tonight’s report took this smear campaign to a new low.”

It is a pretty good general policy to regard O’Reilly as someone who is “misleading and inaccurate” and whom few take seriously. Although O’Reilly takes himself seriously enough to make up for all of those who know that he’s a joke. In response to remarks by Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, O’Reilly imagines that he is now at war with the White House. And, once again, he cites his ratings as evidence that Fox News will prevail in such a war.

First of all, there is no correlation between TV ratings and public opinion. This has been proven repeatedly. Secondly, when will O’Reilly and his comrades at Fox get it through their heads that being a top rated cable network is not an endorsement of their journalistic credibility. The National Enquirer has twice the circulation of the nation’s top daily newspaper (USA Today). By O’Reilly’s reasoning, the Enquirer is the the best newspaper in the country.

Finally, the notion that O’Reilly could seriously address the question of whether Fox News and the White House are at war is the best evidence that they are a disreputable enterprise whose obvious biases should disqualify them from being granted press credentials. The truth is that Fox News has more in common with the National Enquirer than a vast community of gullible readers/viewers. It is only a matter of time before Fox broadcasts headlines directly from the Enquirer. In fact, they may already be doing so. Stories about the President being a secret Muslim born in Kenya, and a health care plan that implements “death panels” for the purpose of euthanizing your grandma, could have come right out of the same issue of the Enquirer announcing the capture of Bigfoot by intergalactic (illegal) aliens.


The Antilogical Reasoning Of Glenn Beck

Posted by on August 12, 2009 at 3:03 pm. 5 Comments :

Glenn Beck has already solidified his position as the Evangelist of the Coming Obama-Pocalypse. Now he is pioneering a revolutionary new model for polemics that introduces a level of absurdity heretofore unimagined in the world of rational thought. It is a breakthrough that rattles the foundations of conventional discourse. In recognition of this achievement, Beck will forever be remembered as the Stephen Hawking of what I shall dub “Antilogical Reasoning” – or reasoning that contradicts its own premise. Perhaps the best example of antilogics is Beck’s recent comments as to whether President Obama is a racist:

“This President has, I think, exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep seated hatred for white people or the white culture. I don’t know what it is […] I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. He has a…This guy is, I believe, a racist.”

Beck also employs antilogical concepts when he beseeches his audience not to engage in violence against their opponents, then describes those opponents as an imminent threat to everything you hold dear – your family, your country, your faith, your freedom. And just yesterday Beck antilogically asserted that eugenics was not coming to America, except for the fact that the forces that led to eugenics in Nazi Germany are all taking shape here with the obvious and inevitable conclusion that eugenics is coming to America. Textbook antilogica.

In making his case against eugenics, courageously confronting this nation’s powerful pro-eugenics lobby, Beck proffered a distinctly personal argument that moved him to tears, again. This time it was the thought of his cerebral palsy-stricken daughter who would not have been permitted to live under the vile Nazi regime. [Note: The first time Beck cried on his Fox News program was on the debut episode. Like now, he was thinking of his daughter whom he was reminded of while interviewing his first guest, Sarah Palin, who also has a special needs child] Beck then extended his argument to accuse Obama’s health care policy adviser, Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel, of holding positions sympathetic to eugenics.

The allegations Beck made against Emmanuel were typical of his fact-free, hate-filled diatribes. Beck selectively cites passages from Emmanuel’s writings and deposits them about as far from any honest context as he can get. For instance, he alleges that Emmanuel supports rationing of scarce heath care resources based on age or the patient’s projected productivity or some other unspecified cost/benefit analysis. The truth is, Emmanuel’s writings referred specifically to critical situations that required the most difficult decision making. He was writing about cases where there might be a single kidney available, but three terminal patients in need of a transplant. Circumstances like that require a decision because the kidney cannot be allowed to go to waste. But it has nothing to do with government bureaucrats (or death panels) allocating care and pinching pennies as Beck implied. It’s a decision that requires an informed and sensitive bio-ethicist – exactly what Dr. Emmanuel is.

But Beck using his daughter with cerebral palsy as a prop to attack Emmanuel has an additional irony attached to it. You see, Emmanuel’s own sister has cerebral palsy. So it turns out that Beck is attacking a doctor who is uniquely aware of the hardships faced by those with special needs and their families. And if that’s not enough, Emmanuel is also Jewish, in fact an Israeli-American. This is the man that Beck is slandering with associations to Nazis.

Unfortunately, this sort of backlashing attack is not a unique occurrence amongst conservative fear mongers. An article in Investor’s Business Daily sought to denigrate the British National Health Service by asserting that someone with serious health problems would be discriminated against when being assessed for benefits. Remember Stephen Hawking?

“People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.”

However, the IBD missed a little factoid that may be relevant. Prof. Hawking happens to be British and has been cared for by their medical system for 45 years. In the wake of the IDB article, Hawking said…

“I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.”

Realizing their mistake, IDB edited their article placing a note at the top that says…

“Editor’s Note: This version corrects the original editorial which implied that physicist Stephen Hawking, a professor at the University of Cambridge, did not live in the UK.”

That correction needs a correction. The problem with the original article was not that they implied that Hawking didn’t live in the UK. It was that they falsely claimed that Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance” due to his living in the UK. What’s more, IBD claims to have corrected the article’s mistake, but in fact they merely deleted the whole paragraph referencing Hawking (here is the Google-cached original). According to IBD, pretending that something you wrote never existed constitutes a correction.

So Obama isn’t a racist, he just hates white people. And you shouldn’t resort to violence, but you must fight back against the demons that are surrounding you. And eugenics isn’t coming to America, except that it is. And Glenn Beck isn’t a crazy, lying, paranoid, megalomaniac, he just plays one on TV.

On a side note, congratulations to Prof. Stephen Hawking who today received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in a ceremony with the President and 15 other recipients.


Fox News Pulls The Plug On The President

Posted by on August 11, 2009 at 4:55 pm. 10 Comments :

Today’s town hall meeting in New Hampshire with President Obama was highly promoted by all the major television news organizations, including Fox News. However, when the event took place, Fox News decided to bail out of the live broadcast just as the floor was opened to questions from the audience. Both CNN and MSNBC broadcast the Q&A in its entirety.

Fox News likes to promote itself as “fair and balanced.” Anyone with a functioning cerebrum knows that that isn’t true, but the brazen nature of this programming bias deserves special recognition. Fox has unambiguously proven that they are the network of melodrama. A civil discourse on public matters, no matter how important, will always lose out to a wild police car chase (which was actually on Fox prior to the Obama town hall).

The moment that Fox chose to abandon the event was just after the audience started asking questions. What became immediately obvious was that Fox had no interest in continuing coverage because they concluded that the event was not confrontational enough. The first couple of questions were not the sort that would incite the frothing anger that has become a staple of Fox News’ coverage of the health care debate. Even David Bauder of the Associated Press recognized the barely hidden motivation of Fox:

“Fox News Channel cut away from President Barack Obama’s town hall meeting on health care reform Tuesday as he faced a far more polite crowd than has attended many meetings hosted by members of Congress recently. CNN and MSNBC carried the session in full […] The loud public debates have been a tonic for cable news networks during normally quiet August.”

If the AP gets it, you know it’s reached new levels of clarity. As the town hall progressed, the questions became more probing. They included inquiries into some of the most controversial matters that have characterized this issue: death panels, taxes, rationing, etc. But Fox News’ audience saw none of this despite the notice that anchor Trace Gallagher gave after they broke coverage:

“Any contentious questions, anybody yelling, we will bring it to you here.”

Well, that’s comforting. The striking thing about that statement, other than the fact that he did not adhere to it, is that it is an admission that Fox News is only interested in contentiousness and yelling. It is rather startling that Gallagher would make a promise to his viewers that amounts to a declaration that Fox will only present the President when he can be made to look embattled or unpopular. Fox never did return to the event.

Gallagher did, however, keep his promise to provide contentious programming. Much of the time that the Obama town hall was in progress, Fox News replayed arguments captured at town halls for senators Cardin and McCaskill. These shoutfests were aired with a little box in the corner showing Obama’s event minus the sound. So Fox made a deliberate decision to avoid the President’s newsmaking appearance and replace it with yesterday’s more pugnacious, albeit stale, news. The rest of the time was spent with Fox pundits predictably bashing the President even though they weren’t even listening to what he was saying.

It appears that the only way for Obama to get any airtime on Fox News would be to cater to Fox’s appetite for sensationalism and lead the police on a wild car chase. Or maybe to be caught having dinner with the OctoMom. Or better yet, lead the police on a wild car chase with the OctoMom, Michael Jackson’s doctor, and a piece of the Shroud of Turin.

This is, of course, all Obama’s fault. He should know by now that the one thing you never do if you want to be on Fox News is to be reasonable, intelligent, and honest. He should be ashamed of himself.


As Fox News Goes Up, The GOP Goes Down

Posted by on August 10, 2009 at 4:04 pm. 7 Comments :

Last month I published an article on how Fox News Is Killing The Republican Party. It explored in detail how the embrace of lunatics and their demented ravings, along with a misunderstanding of the television marketplace, was literally dragging the Republican Party down to some of its lowest historical depths:

“The more the population at large associates Republican ideology with the agenda of Fox News, and the fringe operators residing there, the more the party will be perceived as out of touch, or even out of their minds.”

Now Gawker has affirmed my analysis with a chart showing the divergent prospects of Fox News and the Republican Party. I took the liberty of modifying their chart to spotlight the period following last November’s election (amongst other things, like the demise of the GOP logo).

It couldn’t be much clearer. The post-election fate of Fox News is diametrically opposed to that of the GOP. The disparity has increased sinced November and shows no signs of letting up. Gawker sums it up nicely saying…

“Fox News’ viewership is up 45% over the last year, and it’s easy to see why: The ascendancy of a charismatic black Democrat has driven frightened, paranoid, enraged, nativist zealots into the ideological embrace of an outlet that habitually reconfirms everything they already believe. Watching Glenn Beck’s spell-binding sermons on Barack Obama’s racism is comforting to people who believe that their way of life-namely, one in which fatherly white Christians protect us from danger both internal and external-is under attack. So they do it more frequently. Tuning into Hannity et.al. becomes a life-affirming political act.”

Nuff said.