Moving on past the thread clutter of the usual attacks on liberal posters like myself from the usual right wingers on JREF, .....
I thought I'd look a little closer at the supposed biases of the two stations much of the thread is focused on, MSNBC and Fox.
A Google search for
murdoch admits fox is slanted easily gets documentation of this fact including a
clip on Murdoch on a panel (World Economic Forum) being asked by Charlie Rose, "Rupert, is there any agenda that you want to shape?" The audience laughs as if to say, "D'uh."
First Murdoch says, No. Then he says "we don't have the power to change it" "you'd like to make a difference" then he goes on to say they tried to, they backed Bush's policies until Murdoch became disillusioned with how Bush executed the war.
Anyone here trying to make the ridiculous claim, Fox is not slanted news, has no credibility. Feel free to take a poll on that if you doubt my words.
But what about MSNBC? A similar Google search for
MSNBC is slanted was not as specific as the Murdoch search, but it's no wonder given the fact GE owns MSNBC rather than an individual.
It did turn up the interesting attempt by O'Reilly to go after Olbermann last month at the GE shareholder's meeting. O'Reilly is relentless trying to attack his critics. He was obsessed with Al Franken for quite some time and now it's Olbermann who clearly gets O'Reilly's goat.
Politico; by Michael Calderone: GE execs questioned about MSNBC slant and
Drama at GE shareholders meeting
O'Reilly and Olbermann both did a report on the meeting on their respective shows.
The comments on that first report claiming many in the audience were unhappy with MSNBC's liberal bias (I think Scarborough should feel a bit slighted by such a charge, BTW) made me wonder just who would be driving this slant other than a management decision to target a market audience?
SourceWatch doesn't have much on MSNBC other than to say it is owned by Microsoft and GE.
Microsoft only owns 18%. So I looked up GE given that's the shareholder's meeting the staged O'Reilly producer confrontation occurred at.
GE couldn't be more conservative. So how is it MSNBC is supposed to have a liberal bias?
FAIR reports on corporate ownership of NBC and while they go on to say
So we have Fox News owned by a man who has publicly admitted slanting the news and MSNBC which is supposedly biased in the liberal direction but which is owned by a conservative minded corporation.
I'm not trying to say Olbermann and Maddow are not news programs with clearly liberal sentiments. But I find it hard to believe they'd be on if they were promoting liberal agendas with blatantly false information or dishonest tactics.
Fox, OTOH, has been the focus of exposes' from
"OutFoxed - Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism" to this one from FAIR in 2001,
"The Most Biased Name in News - Fox News Channel's extraordinary right-wing tilt".
The right wingers can whine all they want about the fact MSNBC has programming that targets a liberal market audience. It's like complaining there are dramas on in prime time when you like sitcoms. But it has no bearing on the quality of those programs. The quality isn't missing from Fox just because they target a conservative market. It's because they do it with the intent of manipulating the audience's political views.
All the programs are on with a degree of entertainment. But on Fox there is the added matter of the entertainers being able and even encouraged to totally distort the facts without impunity.
