Monday, June 11, 2007

STUDY: FOX LAGS IN WAR COVERAGE

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has studied the amount of time mainstream media outlets spend on coverage of the war in Iraq. Fox News is the outlier, spending about half as much time on the war as MSNBC.

The Associated Press reports:
The difference was more stark during daytime news hours than in prime-time opinion shows. The Iraq war occupied 20 percent of CNN's daytime news hole and 18 percent of MSNBC's. On Fox, the war was talked about only 6 percent of the time. ...

There are no similar differences in priorities among the broadcast evening-news programs, where Iraq was the top story between January and the end of March. NBC's Nightly News spent 269 minutes on Iraq, ABC had 251 and CBS 238, according to news consultant Andrew Tyndall.

Another story that has reflected poorly on the Bush administration, the controversy over U.S. attorney firings, also received more attention on MSNBC (8 percent of the newshole) and CNN (4 percent) than on Fox (2 percent), the Project for Excellence in Journalism found.
What's it mean? The cardboard cutouts masquerading as liberal pundits will say it shows Fox News is biased. Their shallow conservative counterparts will claim it's another example of liberal media bias, aimed at hurting President Bush.

The study proves one thing: Fox has a remarkably different news agenda than any of its mainstream media competitors. Whether this is good or bad for civilization as we know it is up for debate. Your turn to decide reality.

7 comments:

Chris Benjamin said...

Fox has news?

Anonymous said...

I'm sure that 6 percent of news from Iraq on Faux News is the GOOD news Bushbots were always clamoring for. You know, schools being built, infrastructure replaced, Democracy on the rise, our troops treated like liberators, oil exported out of counrty to pay for the war. You know, the good news....

Anonymous said...

The Parisathon on MSGOP and RNCCNN this past week blows this study outta the water.

Hilton-Clinton 08:)

Anonymous said...

Fox News is rated #1 on cable and has changed the face of news...whether anyone likes it or not. They own the brand "Fair & Balanced" with the majority of the viewing and non-viewing public. They used that moniker first, drove it home, and now they own it. Marketing Rule: It's better to be first than it is to be better!

Anonymous said...

Anon 8:05: You're out of your head. Anyone who thinks this war is over oil is a quart low themselves. Wake up and smell what you are shoveling.

Larry Burkum said...

Um, anon 10:45, the other anon was merely pointing out one of the fallacies told by the Bush administration leading up to the war--namely that Iraq's oil esports would pay for the war, costing the U.S. nothing more than a couple million dollars. Like the rest of anon 8:05's list, that certainly hasn't happened. Latest estimates place the monetary cost to the U.S. at a couple TRILLION dollars.

But I'll bite. If the Iraq war isn't over oil, what is it over? What exactly have over 3500 American soldiers given their lives for?

Anonymous said...

Given that all news is reported by human beings, all decisions on what to report are made by human beings and human beings are flawed and have inherent biases there is no news source anymore that is completely impartial. All Fox is doing is taking a bias that is counter to others in the media and using it for their ratings and ad purposes.

Either side of the political spectrum will harp on the "bias" of the other side (we've seen some of that in the responses here) but ultimately every side is biased. I think it's good to have Fox News so that someone can see stories from multiple views and biases and then make up their own minds about things.

Now, we can debate if people are actually doing that and I would likely say that's not happening. Still, that doesn't mean it's not a good thing to have news sources that come at the story from different angles.

I would like to see the actual report to know if they analyzed other stories as well. For example, does Fox have a higher percentage of it's time covering the immigration debate versus it's competitors?