Is Fox News bad for you?

[MontagK505]

The law says if the news media uses a VNR they have to disclose the fact it is paid for news.

I like how people blindly cite the First Amendment sans knowing the facts.

Did you notice I used the word generally? I'm well aware that the first amendment doesn't permit unlimited public speech.

 

[MontagK505]

Wrong Forum.

This is Economics, Business and Finance.
Fox News kills the competition.

I think you want the "Everything Republicans, Conservatives is wrong and Democrats, Liberals fart rainbows & Unicorns thread. In other words the political thread here.

Just trying to help!

You have a good point. I admit to being mystified as to why this thread is located in this sub-forum.

 

[fishbob]

It's worse than that. The selection of topics for the study can itself produce biased results.

People don't have some uniform level of knowledge across all subjects, they are more knowledgeable about some subjects and less knowledgeable about others. And there can be systematic differences across groups. So for example, group A can know a lot about subject 1 and little about subject 2, while group B knows little about subject 1 and a lot about subject 2. If you only or even mostly test people about subject 2, then group A will appear to be less informed than group B, but it's not actually that simple. Unless you have some objective metric for subject distribution, and you make sure that your questions are evenly distributed across this metric (and these researchers did nothing of the sort), then results which show one group or the other being more or less informed will really only tell you about how well informed they are about the specific questions you asked. You cannot reasonably extrapolate the results to indicate any level of general knowledge difference between the groups. In other words, they didn't even establish the correlation they claimed.

You read the study and this is your critique?
Really?

 

[fishbob]

And that is the way freedom of the press should work. If one agency is torturing the statistics to make them tell one side of the story, then another agency can provide a more complete view of the story.

That doesn't happen. Fox is torturing statistics and a comedy show is providing a more complete view of the story.

A comedy show, not a well known news agency, not any news agency, but a comedy show is providing a more complete view of the news than Fox and a logical rebuttal to the Fox distortions.

 

[Howie Felterbush]

Just like pretty much all the news, it's only bad for you if you're dumb enough to take it seriously.

 

[Ziggurat]

You read the study and this is your critique?
Really?

You read my post and this is your critique?
Really?

 

[tyr_13]

Now I'm curious about how you would even do that.

Don't answer. On second thoughts, I don't want to know.

Through the eyes and ears, it gets into your brain and worse, your heart.


To be clear though I seriously disagree with the idea of censoring them. Untrue speech (short of slander and libel) is best dealt with with better speech. This true with all the shortcomings of news networks, which FOX News is really only unique in that it goes in strongly with an obvious ideological bent to go along with sensationalism and emotionalism. The others are either just straight up sensational or more subtle with their ideological bias (which does happen to temper the untrue). Even that is a weak defense though. Other news being bad doesn't make FOX good. It isn't. It's very bad and calling it the worst in mainstream media is arguable, but fairly well supported. Better supported than any other similar claim.

 

[sunmaster14]

Did you look at the video news release disclosure law I cited?

Your example is a tad vague and doesn't represent the extent of Fox News' purposeful deceit. However, Fox did win a court case that ruled in favor of their right to lie to the public.

Talk about propagating lies. The story about the Fox News "right to lie" court case is distorted beyond recognition - to the point of being a lie and a slander against Fox News.

 

[sunmaster14]

How do you know that wasn't dog feces?

Dog feces tastes of dog food.

 

[sunmaster14]

That doesn't happen. Fox is torturing statistics and a comedy show is providing a more complete view of the story.

A comedy show, not a well known news agency, not any news agency, but a comedy show is providing a more complete view of the news than Fox and a logical rebuttal to the Fox distortions.

By the way, here is an interesting example of the Washington Post propagating a clip dishonestly edited and ridiculed by Jon Stewart's Daily Show:

At which point, Stewart skipped to a clip from Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel: “Before they started this, we were all in trouble with insurance to begin with. There’s too much health insurance. It covers too much. Too many people have it,” said Siegel. Stewart gave the guy credit for originality: “Congratulations, I’ve never heard that before.”

Here is the original quote from Dr. Marc Siegel (my emphasis added):

“What Obamacare really got wrong ... is understanding that we're talking about the health care needs of the people of the US, not the health insurance needs. It's a totally different thing. Before they started this, we were all in trouble with insurance to begin with. There’s too much health insurance. It covers too much. Too many people have it, and they can't get in my office to see me. I'm full."

This happens all the time on the Daily Show (some of which gets picked up by mainstream news). Of course, when it happens, Jon Stewart becomes "just a comedian."

 

[sunmaster14]

It's worse than that. The selection of topics for the study can itself produce biased results.

It's even worse than that worseness. Some of the questions don't have objectively correct answers. One of the questions in the FDU poll asked in October 2011 was:

"To the best of your knowledge, have the opposition groups protesting in Egypt been successful in bringing down the regime there?"

The "correct" answer was "yes" and the "wrong" answer was "no." I certainly don't think answering "no" to that question was wrong. I think it was the better answer actually, although either one could be justified.

 

[Chaos]

For some people, it's always disturbing when we have divergent editorial policies on news media. You would think we actually have a working first amendment in the US.

Seriously, I would find it rather Orwellian if all our news media sounded the same.

You would find it Orwellian when all of your news media at least tried to report the facts to the best of their ability?

 

[Ziggurat]

Through the eyes and ears, it gets into your brain and worse, your heart.

Oh. I thought you had something else in mind.

 

[sunmaster14]

You would find it Orwellian when all of your news media at least tried to report the facts to the best of their ability?

You're begging the question to a considerable degree. What you might call facts, I might call opinions, and vice versa. Who is to decide which is which? If the news media were reporting on the solution to a quadratic equation, it should be possible to agree on all of the facts. But what if it is reporting on whether somebody's health insurance plan is now "better" than it was before? If the new plan is not clearly better in all material respects (cost, copay, coinsurance, deductible, coverage, out of pocket caps, and provider network) than who is to decide the relative merits of each of those factors? And what if one side is claiming that certain hidden costs are being ignored, e.g. cost to taxpayers, cost to other premium payers, cost in terms of the quality of medical service overall or perhaps the speed of medical innovation? Reporting on issues which divide us politically is always tricky. If all of the relevant facts were clear, then the issue probably wouldn't be one on which we were divided politically.

 

[Ziggurat]

You would find it Orwellian when all of your news media at least tried to report the facts to the best of their ability?

Which facts? There are an infinitude of facts out there. It's always a subjective judgment call as to which facts are worth reporting. A uniformity in editorial selection of what to report would indeed betray a troubling group-think, and such a scenario is not to be welcomed.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Talk about propagating lies. The story about the Fox News "right to lie" court case is distorted beyond recognition - to the point of being a lie and a slander against Fox News.

Did I hurt your feelings?

Feel free to give your alternative version, I see nothing distorted about the links I posted but if you actually have some facts or evidence, let's see it.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

By the way, here is an interesting example of the Washington Post propagating a clip dishonestly edited and ridiculed by Jon Stewart's Daily Show:

Here is the original quote from Dr. Marc Siegel (my emphasis added):

This happens all the time on the Daily Show (some of which gets picked up by mainstream news). Of course, when it happens, Jon Stewart becomes "just a comedian."

The Daily Show is satire. It's commentary on the news, not news.

However, I don't get your issue, at all. Sorry, I see nothing about Stewart's piece that is contradicted by your in context version. Could you be a bit more specific what your complaint is?

Or maybe you just don't get it. Saying the problem with health insurance is there's not enough to go around so tough luck poor people is exactly what Stewart hears in that Fox News piece. What do you hear in it?

 

[sunmaster14]

Did I hurt your feelings?

Feel free to give your alternative version, I see nothing distorted about the links I posted but if you actually have some facts or evidence, let's see it.

I will assume familiarity with the case, so I'm not going to summarize. For those who are interested in the details, the appeals court decision goes into some of the background. Here is a link to a news report about the original jury verdict.

Basically, the plaintiffs - reporters Jane Akre and her husband Steve Wilson - lost in court on their claim that Fox News asked them to lie about their story on Monsanto's dairy cow growth hormone. The jury didn't believe that Fox had asked them to lie. Fox News instead had asked the reporters to change things in the report which Monsanto had pointed out were factual errors.

What Akre did prevail on originally was her claim that she was wrongfully fired under Florida's whistleblower statute (weirdly enough, her husband did not prevail on that claim). The statute basically says that if you get fired by your employer for threatening to report an illegal act to the authorities, then you are eligible for damages, and the jury awarded her $425K.

On appeal, Fox News lawyers argued, among many different substantive things, that the Florida whistleblower law had no application because even if all that Akre alleged was true (it wasn't actually, and the jury ruled that her accusations were untrue), it wouldn't apply because she wouldn't fit the definition of a whistleblower.

Fox lawyers of course argued that Fox did not ask anybody to lie and in fact that the Akre story was pulled because it was factually flawed. However, the appeals court never reached those issues. It immediately noted Akre's failure to state a claim, i.e. even if all she alleged was true, she wouldn't be a whistleblower because a whistleblower (under Florida law) required that she was fired for threatening to report an illegal act. The act she was threatening to report was not illegal.

This is how the legal process in the US works. As a threshold matter, the court looks at whether the plaintiff would win assuming that every fact that she alleges is true. If she wouldn't, then the court goes no further. Good lawyers of course will point this out as part of their argument. It doesn't mean they're conceding that every fact the plaintiff alleges is true. Quite the opposite actually.

By the way, here is an excerpt from the original news report I linked to before:

"This is a wonderful day," said Phil Metlin, the news director of Fox 13. "The jury realized that Fox never told anyone to lie, distort or slant the news." Metlin said Fox will appeal the damages awarded to Akre.

And of course the dairy cow growth hormone, which Akre and her husband insisted had adverse health effects, is still in use today, so their conclusions were obviously not definitive (and probably not indicative).

I find it fascinating that this meme that Fox argued in court that it had the right to broadcast lies (which it actually does not under FCC rules) has become an article of faith in liberal circles even though it is a complete distortion of something which is easily accessible in the public record. I am trying to think of something similar on the conservative side, but all of the examples I come up with are either fringe ideas or not easily disproved because they are more subjective claims than objective ones. I would be grateful for an example if somebody can provide one.

 

[sunmaster14]

The Daily Show is satire. It's commentary on the news, not news.

However, I don't get your issue, at all. Sorry, I see nothing about Stewart's piece that is contradicted by your in context version. Could you be a bit more specific what your complaint is?

Or maybe you just don't get it. Saying the problem with health insurance is there's not enough to go around so tough luck poor people is exactly what Stewart hears in that Fox News piece. What do you hear in it?

The Daily Show is more than just a comedy show, and Jon Stewart née Leibowitz is more than just a comedian. I think his audience expects to be able to tell the difference between truth and fiction on his show, and because of that, the parts they perceive as truth really do leave an impression. Studies have shown that the Daily Show and the Colbert Report are actually the main sources of news for many people, particularly people under the age of 30.

An additional point of course is that portions of these shows are often rebroadcast by other news outlets. My link actually went to a Washington Post article where the author highlighted Stewart's criticism, thus adding the Washington Post's imprimatur to a slander.

As for the clip itself, I'm a bit surprised that I have to explain this to you, but Stewart left the impression that Dr. Marc Siegel was lamenting the fact that too many people have health insurance. He wasn't lamenting that. He was lamenting the fact that too many people have health insurance AND still can't get health care. Stewart left off the all important "and." The whole point was that health insurance does not equal access to health care. And if the problem is an insufficient supply of health care resources (which it is in large part, which is why prices are so high and why provider networks are getting narrower and wait times longer), then giving people a piece of paper saying that they now have comprehensive health insurance isn't going to solve the problem.

It's a perfectly valid point, but Stewart edited the video clip to make it seem as if Siegel was a malicious idiot.

 

[Myron Proudfoot]

it's bad for democracy, when a significant chuck of the population gets its news from a dishonet propaganda source.

IMHO, the alternatives (CNN, MSNBC, the major networks) are not particularity good sources either. Having to chose between Fox and CNN for your main news source is like choosing between dog crap with glass chips or spoiled milk with grass clippings for your main meal.

I've noted before that in a previous career I could read and watch much of the world's press on a daily basis. It was eye-opening. I lost all respect for much of the US press and Fox would have fit right in with Pravda in the Cold War. People who get their news from Fox have only a very slightly better understanding of the world than residents of Pyongyang who depend on the DRPK's press.