[1]Michael van der Galiën: [1]
Of course, the problem isn’t that Fox News is biased, it’s that the bias isn’t liberal / Laborite [2]. No, the real problem is that Fox News has a conservative bias. If the news network was pro-Democrats Michael Tomasky wouldn’t have said anything about it of course.
Although I agree that Fox News is biased, and that this isn’t always a good thing, I can’t help but point out that this:
In the meantime, Democrats should ratchet up their refusal to pretend that Fox bears any relationship to news. I’ve always felt they should just boycott the network en bloc. One can be pretty confident that if the situation were reversed – imagine a cable channel that was known as a Democratic house organ and run by, say, Bill Clinton adviser James Carville – Republicans would have done something like that long ago. I asked Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic speaker, about this last Friday, and she just replied wanly: “I think we have to reach out to all the viewers out there.”
is ridiculous. CNN anyone [3]? If there ever was a pro-Democrats news network, it’s CNN.
Well, look; You’re right, CNN is a living definition of liberal bias. However, let’s not forget CBS, ABC, and NBC. A quick look at these reveals that liberal bias is not a problem limited to CNN alone. (To leave aside for the moment the left-leaning in the dead tree media)
Michael, there is a reason why the supporters of the leftist media do not label it biased; they think they’re at the political center. The importance of recognizing that assumption on the part of the liberal press, cannot be overemphasized.
It is, however, an assumption which would seem to be blown away by the ratings of the respective networks… as would your own assumption about Fox being biased.
A look at the ratings of all four of the networks that we have established as liberal biased doesn’t approach what FNC has managed to do in terms of gathering viewers. TV, after all is the ultimate in popularity contesting. (Ask Katie Couric.) In short, the people have voted with their feet, as to which is biased and which is not. Fox won.
When the left loses, we have often enough heard the claim that the American public tunes out what they don’t want to hear. Well, if that’s true, and if Fox is the ratings leader by a wide margin, how is it that the Democrat party can claim with a straight face that they are at the political center of the American people? If what we were talking about was a smallish lead, we’d view all this as a statistical blip, a little noise level. However, that’s not the case; the viewer numbers leaning toward Fox are overwhelming and have been for quite a while, now.
Beyond this measurement, how does one make claims of ‘bias’, when clearly Fox News is clearly and directly in the mainstream of America, and these others are being so soundly rejected?