Understanding The History And Purpose Of FOX News
You’d think a thing like FOX couldn’t happen in the United States. Although they’re free to be crazy and free to support the Republican Party, you’d think Americans would be too smart to fall for the made-up outrages, dishonest reporting and relentless appeal to our meaner nature. Unfortunately, many Americans are not as smart as we used to assume: a huge swath of Americans (especially elderly white Southerners) believe FOX is just another news media outlet. They aren’t.
What is FOX? Pensitore Review (8-18-09) pulled no punches in answering that question: “ FOX News is indisputably the most popular cable news channel. And yet in 13 years, Fox has never broken a story. That’s okay, because it is not in the news business. It is in the news-shaping business. Its programming is an admixture of right-wing propaganda and fear-porn for feeble-minded paranoiacs, served up by spokesmodels who have no clue what they are reading.”
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Whew! Could that be true? I report/You decide:
Nixon White House aide Roger Ailes in the 1970′s created fake news stories that favored President Nixon. He shipped these pre-mixed video packages to TV stations around the country at the expense of rightwing extremist Joseph Coors. It was all b.s. all the time, but the TV stations, pretending they had a correspondent in Washington, ran this propaganda as straight news. Now that Ailes runs FOX News, his goals are the same: to spread republicanism by altering the news.
FOX is a “relentless agenda-driven 24 hour news opinion propaganda delivery system” ~Jon Stewart
“They’re a Republican brand. They’re an extension of the Republican Party with some exceptions” ~Larry King
”[Fox is] widely viewed as a part of the Republican Party: take their talking points and put them on the air, take their opposition research and put it on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news organization like CNN is.” ~Anita Dunn
There are thousands of examples of FOX not just “leaning” in a particular direction on an issue… but actively changing around the words and meanings of interviews to make them seem to say the opposite of what the person interviewed actually said; of lies about what happened; of incorrect graphics…for example, calling Congressman Mark Foley a Democrat when he got caught in gay chatter with pages and calling Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords a Republican when there was an outpouring of sympathy for her after she got shot.
FOX took a sparsely-attended tea-party rally in Washington and spliced in video of a heavily-attended event of an entirely different nature from months earlier.
FOX has gotten caught using image manipulation software to edit the appearance of people they don’t like to make them appear more sinister.
FOX alters poll results to mislead its viewers; in one case, their massacre of a Rasmussen poll on climate change ended up with a poll number of 120%–mathematically impossible, of course, except in FOX world.
On 4-24-09… White House correspondent Wendell Goler cropped a comment by Obama and took it out of context — effectively reversing the statement’s meaning — to falsely suggest that Obama supports creating a health care system “like the European countries.”
A 2010 Ohio State University study of public misperceptions about the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” found that viewers who relied on Fox News were 66% more likely to believe incorrect rumors than those with “low reliance” on Fox News ~Wikipedia
A study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes showed 67% of Fox viewers believed that the “U.S. has found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al Qaeda terrorist organization” (He wasn’t. He hated, feared and banned them, but you’d never know that by watching FOX).
Wait, it gets worse: For all other networks and news sources, the MORE you watch them, the MORE you know about the actual facts. Those who view CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, & NPR the MOST, have the BEST grasp of the FACTS. With FOX it – is- the – opposite!! Which is what gave birth to the mocking slogan: THE MORE YOU WATCH FOX, THE LESS YOU KNOW.
In the summer of 2003, 34% of Americans who did not follow the news very closely believed evidence had been found that linked Iraq with al Qaeda before the U.S. invasion. 42% of people who were moderate consumers of FOX news had that opinion. Among those who “watched FOX News very closely” … that number was 80% !! ~Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 118, #4 THE MORE YOU WATCH FOX, THE LESS YOU KNOW!
FOX News’ Happening Now cropped clips of Obama from an April 3 speech in France to falsely suggest that Obama only criticized the United States. In doing so, Happening Now joined conservative commentators and Fox News hosts who have cropped or misrepresented Obama’s overseas remarks to falsely suggest, in the words of host Sean Hannity, that Obama was “blam[ing] America first” and, more broadly, that Obama’s earlier overseas trip constituted an “apology tour.”
Fox News presented a clip of Joe Biden criticizing John McCain’s “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” statement…. Problem is, this was something Biden was QUOTING…from SIX MONTHS EARLIER… but it was edited by FOX to make it seem that Biden was stating it as his own opinion. The bogus clip was introduced by Live Desk co-host Martha MacCallum as comments Biden had made in interviews THIS WEEKEND.
FOX pushed the bogus stat that cap-and-trade would cost “every American family $1,761 annually.” PolitiFact.com has labeled the statistic false and noted that the talking point has been pushed by Republicans.
On 9/30/09 FOX Gregg Jarrett said on the air that the Obama Department of Justice “thinks it’s OK to intimidate white people, not OK to intimidate black people at the polls.”
”If we went back … to the fall of 2008, to the campaign, that was a time this country was in two wars that we had a financial collapse probably more significant than any financial collapse since the Great Depression. If you were a Fox News viewer in the fall election what you would have seen were that the biggest stories and the biggest threats facing America were a guy named Bill Ayers and a something called ACORN.” ~Anita Dunn
A 2011 Kaiser Family Foundation survey on U.S. misperceptions about health care reform found that Fox News viewers scored lower for factual knowledge than other news viewers – Wikipedia
It’s against the law to lie on television in Canada. Canadian conservatives tried to change that law so FOX could broadcast in Canada. They were unable to get the law changed, so FOX does not operate in Canada!
Related posts:
Canada now has “Sun News TV” with Ezra Levant and Michael Coren, which is worse than Fox News. Canada has changed.
It should be illegal for news programs to take advertizing money. That would be money well spent, for the American taxpayer. Have Tivo turn off all the ads. They’d probably have Lady Gaga strip naked, just to get you to watch them. I don’t think that would make me vote Republican, anyway.
Amazing how defensive, and aggressive, readers of the original post become when others post their opinions. Do I watch FOX News? Yes. Do I watch other sources of news? Sometimes. Do I depend on television news broadcasts for all of my news information? Absolutely not! I have seen, and read, quotes taken out of context by every media outlet at some point of another. The only way to get all of the FACTS is to do your own research and find the original speach, interview or law. All news is to be taken with a grain of salt because there is NO ONE who only reports ths straight facts.
Fox News is indeed available in Canada with the right cable or satellite package. The CRTC rule that the right wing tried to change was with regard to *knowingly* providing false information, which is how they are able to skirt the rule.
In April, we also saw the debut of a Canadian FOX clone, SunTV, which is doing very much the same thing to help engineer a neo-liberal (not to be confused with “liberal”) society, but being more crafty in places.
Liber Media? Good grief. They’re only as Liberal as the Conservatives owners allow them to be.
Liberal Media? It’s only as Liberal as the Conservative owners allow it to be.
The replies I’ve read here that have been written by conservatives seem to think that FOX simply reports news with a right-winged ideology. I think they all must be part of the FOX audience.
The point of this article is that FOX LIES. It lies and it lies and it lies. If lying is a right-winged ideology, than I’m as left-winged as a human can get.
It’s one thing to have a different viewpoint. it’s another to categorically lie and manipulate the facts in order to push your own view.
mainstream media makes it a goal to attack fox news at least once a day minimum. and fox vice versa. mostly to cnn and nbc.
sure they attack the left wing media and politics on a daily basis. but guess what? every time i watch fox they have someone from the left and someone from the right debating almost everything thats being said. i don’t believe everything thats said on every news station. I watch fox because 95% of the time they’re talking about republicans, democrats, a police chase that just happened in san diego, a hostage situation in chicago, etc. While CNN, msnbc, etc. ALL THEY TALK ABOUT IS HOW DANGEROUS REPUBLICANS ARE!!!!! and how good democrats are. I’m not a democrat, I’m not a republican, I guess you could say I’m a Libertarian. I believe the 2 party system has failed. and the scariest part is it’s never going to repair itself. pretty soon its going to reach a boiling point, its gonna start turning to violence instead of debates, and we’re all gonna be in another civil war. John Adams said, “Democracy… while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”
And I believe that straight where we’re heading. you go on about my republican is better than your democrat. as much as i detest saying it, i’m moving to canada before the blood starts spilling. because when it starts it’s not going to end pretty. think of the civil war times 100.
Fox needs to lean right , CNN, Msnbc, cbs, nbc,abc and so on all lean left, we need someone to tell the truth..don’t just listen,,read, think and learn to make your own path..
FOX News is broadcast in Canada, and it’s not illegal to lie on television in Canada. However, it is illegal to knowingly present factually false information or otherwise lie on the news. Which is why Neither Fox News nor Sun Media’s new channel aren’t licensed as news channels in Canada, but rather simply (hyper-biased) political commentary / entertainment.
Why is it alright that the mainstream media, NPR, etc.. can lean far to the left, but the left can’t seem to accept a conservative view point. For a group that refers to themselves as progressive thinkers and accepting of all types and viewpoints, there sure is a lot intolerance here. Also, I would be willing to bet that most of the information received by these readers is second hand through the skewed eye of the liberal media about Fox news. Does anyone here really watch Fox News and come to their own honest conclusions? I didn’t think so.
Please tell me how FOX does not fall into the ‘Mainstream’ media category….I’m sick of all you FOX defenders acting like they’re the victims and the villain is ‘THE MAINSTREAM’. If anything FOX is the mainstream…its the most watched ‘news’ channel in the US. So..stop playing the victim here and comparing a news operation that operates in the 88-89 frequencies to one of the worlds biggest broadcast companies..ie NewsCorp..
So please, try and educate yourself a little, maybe some NPR would do you some good.
The difference is very simple. Fox lies. The tell straight up lies marketed as news. Even when other media outltets do lean left they’re not lying to push that agenda!
What the heck is this tripe? I have learned that when someone accuses a person of an action, like the libs calling conservatives racists, the accuser is the one who is actually committing the act. CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, & NPR et. all national media outlets are exactly towards the left and democrats like this article accuses Fox news of being towards the right. This article is based on ZERO facts. This is simply an opinion piece. Quotes are used from three huge liberals (Stewert, King, Dunn) and we are to believe this inane article. I lost IQ points and am now stupider for reading this. You libs are dangerously delusional and honestly quite stupid. Your arrogance is beyond comprehension. You all believe in man made global warming. That shows your stupidity. And when warming doesn’t happen for ten years you must change it to climate change. And there thousands upon thousands of people at the Tea Party rallies. The one in DC was well over 500,000 people. Not two million like some said but still a lot. But these greedy, selfish rapists, poopers of Occupy movements? The numbers are paltry. You lib tards are the true minority in this country. You are loud, you are a mob, but you are a minority and you are honestly a bunch of losers. Your lives have no meanings and you will believe any lie to simply feel good about yourself. Again, you are a bunch of losers.
There you have it, folks. Republican math at its finest.
DEMS = CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, & NPR
GOP = FOX
Somehow,this demonstrates a minority stake for the Democrats in the popularity contest. It may be a pity that people like this are allowed to vote…but it’s an absolute horror that they are allowed to reproduce!
“I lost IQ points and am now stupider…” – I’m sensing this is something that’s happened before.
Cliff, are you an 8 year old boy? You act like one. Adults are talking on this thread.
Libtards? Rapists? WTF is your problem? Maybe you’re just a typical Republican. Is that how you represent your party?
It appears that you are too stupid to realize your hateful rant only proves to the readers what happens when someone becomes engrossed in FOX news land, where Republicans are ALWAYS 100% right on every issue, every time, and people who disagree with Republicans are 100% wrong, every time, every day, week, month, year, and decade.
I get it, people who disagree with Republicans on issues are Hitlerist Sorosist Racist Reverse-Racist Socialist Trotskyist Teleprompterist Kenyanist Maoist Stalinist Communist Fascists who hate America, are lazy, stupid, brainwashed, cannot think for themselves, and want to offer therapy and understanding to terrorists. Feel free to copy/paste this for your future enlightening comments.
All I can say to you is you are not winning any hearts and minds. You are an embarassment for your party. Furthermore if you think you are a majority, fine. Enjoy being comfortable. Live in your bubble. Understand though that we all know if someone like you says it, then the opposite is probably true.
Have a nice day! :)
The fact that you said “stupider” just shows you didn’t have much in the way of IQ points to begin with… The “ideal” FAUX NEWS viewer. :P lmao
And sadly Comedy Central has the two best shows out there calling Fox on their bs. Mainstream media needs to unite against Fox and their outright lies and attacks on journalism, not to mention our democracy.