This is a guest post by TallahasseeScene’s Cassidy Curls
With its ridiculously inaccurate nature, Fox News is the loser of the media world.
The following table from political science authors Kull, Ramsay, and Lewis (this feels like school, I know) shows misperceptions about various aspects of the Iraq war, according to the respondent’s source of news. As you can see, 80% of Fox News viewers had at least one or more misperceptions about the War in Iraq. Compared to NPR/PBS viewers, Fox News viewers were almost 3.5 times as likely to hold misperceptions that would justify a war in Iraq.
Via: uakron.edu
And I bet that’s no surprise. However, CBS, ABC, CNN, and NBC aren’t exactly the heroes of this story either.
The fact is that sensational news has fostered a media world wholly concerned with ratings and viewership, not necessarily with accuracy and fact.
This is partially a societal phenomenon. Anyone who has seen Anchorman 2 knows that the growth in 24-hour news has bred competition between networks to “break” the story first, regardless of relevancy or importance to a community or the viewer.
The “Breaking News” phenomenon is everywhere. It seems as if the final piece of evidence to finally explain the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian flight 370 has been found every time I turn on CNN. Sensationalism, or “the use of exciting or shocking stories or language at the expense of accuracy, in order to provoke public interest or excitement” has come to define the media world. Alongside this phenomenon, “Breaking News” flashes across the television screen for every story, robbing the phrase of its validity completely.
Via: mediamatters.org
This pressure to awe and alarm has its roots in beliefs and political leanings. In order to truly pull an audience, a news network must present relevant and, most importantly, agreeable information to its viewership. This tendency for news networks to “lean” is simply a mechanism for success in a world obsessed with only reading or watching the news they agree with.
With this pressure to offer news specified for a certain demographic, political group, or culture, the accuracy of the information may take a back seat. Case in point: Fox News. As one of the networks under Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (a mass media empire including such publications as The Sun and The Wall Street Journal) Fox News must be understood to be a marketed business. Their targeted demographic of conservative, retired, white Protestants is reflected in their often-falsified reports and statements about the Obama administration’s actions in foreign and domestic policy. Demographics determine content as well, which explains why the network displays such a distinct ideological lean.
On the other end of the spectrum are political satirists, who are renowned for their comedic ridicule of popular conservative news. Shows such as The Daily Show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Colbert Report, and Real Time with Bill Maher all point to the inaccuracies presented by such characters as Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Eric Bolling. Despite these “calling outs” and peer-reviewed research which has revealed that Fox News knowingly reports false information, no changes have been made. Instead, Fox News keeps manufacturing false information, systematically angering/amusing the liberal populace and devaluing the credibility of the American conservative message.
Fox News is not alone in this larger media game. Just remember, cable news is a market. This is not to discredit the industry or tell you to boycott your favorite shows such as Fox & Friends or Hardball with Chris Matthews. However, it is important to understand that cable news is an industry with a corporate background and corporate goals. If news were completely educational, unbiased, and factual, this competitive industry could not exist.
Featured photo courtesy of Comic Book Resources
