'Fair and Balanced': Yeah, if you believe that I have a bridge to sell you
Fox News all day: Hard, and conservative
By Erik Wemple, WashPost, Updated: March 27, 2013
Daytime programming means everything to the defense of Fox News. Ever since the network’s founding in 1996, critics have bashed it as a biased and tendentious network, a house organ of the Republican Party and much, much worse.
The big shots with multimillion-dollar salaries at Fox News have increasingly settled on a standard response to the criticism. Sure, the prime-time lineup and the morning show, “Fox & Friends,” deliver right-leaning fare, in much the same manner that a newspaper has an editorial page. The network’s daytime hours, however, are like the hard news pages, an extended block of straight-up-the-middle reporting and the ideologically blind guts of “Fair and Balanced.”
As the New York Times’s Brian Stelter reported, Fox News executives tout the weekday hours between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. (as well as 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.) as “objective” coverage. In a memorable exchange last year with respected newsman Ted Koppel, Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly cited this block as the difference-maker between Fox News and the competition: “We actually do hard news here from 9 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon,” said O’Reilly, overstating the network’s official position by an hour. “MSNBC doesn’t do one hour of hard news. It’s all, let’s push the liberal Democratic agenda from sign-on to sign-off. So this is a news agency here.”
That argument received a flying buttress last week from a venerable third party. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism completed a study of content at the leading cable-news providers, and the data yielded this chart:
(More here.)
Daytime programming means everything to the defense of Fox News. Ever since the network’s founding in 1996, critics have bashed it as a biased and tendentious network, a house organ of the Republican Party and much, much worse.
The big shots with multimillion-dollar salaries at Fox News have increasingly settled on a standard response to the criticism. Sure, the prime-time lineup and the morning show, “Fox & Friends,” deliver right-leaning fare, in much the same manner that a newspaper has an editorial page. The network’s daytime hours, however, are like the hard news pages, an extended block of straight-up-the-middle reporting and the ideologically blind guts of “Fair and Balanced.”
As the New York Times’s Brian Stelter reported, Fox News executives tout the weekday hours between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. (as well as 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.) as “objective” coverage. In a memorable exchange last year with respected newsman Ted Koppel, Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly cited this block as the difference-maker between Fox News and the competition: “We actually do hard news here from 9 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon,” said O’Reilly, overstating the network’s official position by an hour. “MSNBC doesn’t do one hour of hard news. It’s all, let’s push the liberal Democratic agenda from sign-on to sign-off. So this is a news agency here.”
That argument received a flying buttress last week from a venerable third party. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism completed a study of content at the leading cable-news providers, and the data yielded this chart:
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
And I thought that those on the left side of the aisle valued diversity? Hmm, it appears that diversity is good only if it does not counter liberal orthodoxy. FOX is conservative as compared to the rest (e.g. NPR, CBS, NBC, almost every major city newspaper and on). Wemple should buck up although I suppose some whining and crying over a little competition is to be expected.
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