User:Crazyeddie/Fox News Allegations rewrite

Controversies and allegations of bias

See also: Media bias, Propaganda model

Fox News asserts that it is more objective and factual than other American networks. Its self-promotion includes the phrases "Fair and Balanced" and "We Report, You Decide."

Despite this, many media commentators and competitors have alleged that Fox News has a conservative bias and tailors its news to support the Republican Party. Critics frequently refer to Fox News as the "Faux News Network," the "Republican News Network," "GOP TV," "Fear and Bias," or "Unfair and Unbalanced. Although most critics do not claim that all Fox News reporting is slanted, most allege that bias at Fox News is systemic, and implemented to target a largely right-wing audience.

While Fox News officially denies any bias, conservative or otherwise, many supporters admit that Fox News does have a conservative bias, but that this bias serves as a counterbalance to what they see as the otherwise liberal-slanted mainstream media.

Some of Fox's critics, such as the progressive media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), agree with this to some extent. FAIR believes that the mainstream media, in seeking to be objective, is actually practicing in a "narrow bipartisan centrism" which excludes viewpoints from both the right and the left. According to FAIR, "Fox could potentially represent a valuable contribution to the journalistic mix if it admitted it had a conservative point of view, if it beefed up its hard news and investigative coverage (and cut back on the tabloid sensationalism), and if there were an openly left-leaning TV news channel capable of balancing both Fox's conservatism and CNN's centrism." Need to provide link to FAIR report

The Meaning of Bias

need a different section name

"Everybody who claims they're totally unbiased is full of crap. The issue is how much of what they believe creeps into their news." - Ailes [1]

Allegations of Editorial Bias

Need an intro - something along the lines of most Americans being okay with biased editorialization, but not okay with bias in "straight news" reporting. Might be covered in Meaning of Bias section instead.

• Rupert Murdoch's ownership of several conservative outlets, including the New York Post and The Times. During the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, all 175 Murdoch-owned newspapers worldwide editorialized in favor of the war. [2]
• CEO Roger Ailes' past activities, including: Republican campaign work, involvement in the Willie Horton ad, his production of the Rush Limbaugh television show, and having served as either advisor or consultant to Republican Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

• A report released in August 2001 by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, titled "Fox: The Most Biased Name in News," ([3]) compared guests on Fox's Special Report with Brit Hume with those on CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports:

		white	male	Republican	conservative
	Hume (Fox)	93%	91%	89%	71%
	Blitzer (CNN)	93%	86%	57%	32%

• Use of the term "homicide bomber" instead of "suicide bomber" after White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer made the request. The only other major news organization to do so was fellow Murdoch-owned News Corporation subsidiary the New York Post.

• In a Wall Street Journal Europe op-ed published on May 20, 2005, London bureau chief Scott Norvell wrote: "Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally, and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly." [4], [5]

On-air personalities

Need to tie this in to overall bias somehow. Essentially, critics aren't upset that individual FNC staffers are biased, but that nominally neutral hosts and anchors are actually deeply conservative, and that the token "liberals" are actually punching-bags. In other words, that the atmosphere at Fox is conservative, but with all the "objective" trappings of other networks. The FAIR report might be a good place to look to for ways to do this. This might also be a good area to trim down a little.

A number of Fox News Channel' anchors, hosts and personalities are self-professed right-wing conservatives, and several others are considered such by the channel's critics.

• Managing editor and host Brit Hume is a contributor to the conservative American Spectator and Weekly Standard.
• Daytime anchor David Asman previously worked at The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Manhattan Institute, a conservative thinktank.
• Weekend Live host Tony Snow is a conservative columnist, radio host, and former chief speechwriter for the first Bush administration. He also hosts his own show, The Tony Snow Show, on Fox News Radio.
• Primetime co-host Sean Hannity (paired with Alan Colmes on-air) is one of Fox News' openly partisan anchors, the voice of the political right on Hannity and Colmes; Hannity is also prominent in conservative talk radio, second only to Rush Limbaugh in terms of listeners, and went on tour for George W. Bush before the 2004 election.
• Alan Colmes is touted by Fox as "a hard-hitting liberal" ([6]), but is dismissed by many on the left as being a political moderate too weak to provide an effective balance for self-professed "arch-conservative" Sean Hannity. As executive producer of Hannity and Colmes, Sean Hannity is also Colmes' de facto boss ([7]).
• One of the most well-known personalities is the popular Bill O'Reilly, who hosts the O'Reilly Factor; O'Reilly often faces criticism from the left over perceived pro-war, right-wing slant in his news coverage. O'Reilly himself maintains that he is politically independent (chiefly due to libertarian positions on social issues like homosexuality and marijuana legislation). O'Reilly frequently uses incendiary, nationalist rhetoric toward those who hold disagreeing positions, such as accusing Senator Dick Durbin of "slamming America" and "condemning his own country" over Durbin's criticism of the conditions at the United States' Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba. [8]
• John Gibson's afternoon block of news coverage, "The Big Story," is frequently cited as an example of Fox News deliberately blurring the lines between objective reporting and opinion/editorial programming. Gibson gained notoriety immediately after the 2000 presidential election controversy for his advocating the burning of all ballots involved in the election dispute once George W. Bush was sworn into office: "Is this a case where knowing the facts actually would be worse than not knowing? I mean, should we burn those ballots, preserve them in amber, or shred them? George Bush is going to be president. And who needs to know that he's not a legitimate president?" [9]
• Business anchor Neil Cavuto, who is also Fox News' vice president of business news and a current member of the network's executive committee, has been described as a "Bush apologist" by critics [10] after conducting an allegedly deferential interview with President George W. Bush [11] wherein Cavuto told Bush that domestic lack of support for the partial privatization of Social Security was due to Americans being "distracted" by Michael Jackson's child molestation trial. Cavuto has been a popular syndicated columnist on both Townhall.com [12] and NewsMax.com [13].

Allegations of Bias in "Straight News" Reporting

Again, need intro - something along the lines of bias not meaning untruthful perhaps?

• A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism in 2005 found that, in covering the Iraq War in 2004, 73% of Fox News stories included editorial opinions, compared to 29% on MSNBC and 2% on CNN. The same report found Fox less likely than CNN to present multiple points of view. On the other hand, it found Fox more transparent about its sources[14]. Full report

• Photocopied memos from Fox News executive John Moody instructing the network's on-air anchors and reporters on using positive language when discussing anti-abortion viewpoints, the Iraq war, and tax cuts; as well as requesting that the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal be put in context with the other violence in the area.

• A study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, in the Winter 2003-2004 issue of Political Science Quarterly, reported that viewers of the Fox Network local affiliates or Fox News were more likely than viewers of other news networks to hold three views which the authors labeled as misperceptions:[15] (PDF)
  • 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." In the aggregate, 52% of all respondants who got their news primarily from a single news network held this belief. (See Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda)
  • 33% of Fox viewers believed that the "U.S. has found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" "since the war ended." In the aggregate, 23% of all respondants who got their news primarily from a single news network held this belief. (See Iraq disarmament crisis)
  • 35% of Fox viewers believed that "the majority of people [in the world] favour the U.S. having gone to war" with Iraq. In the aggregate, 23% of all respondants who got their news primarily from a single news network held this belief. (See Governments' pre-war positions on invasion of Iraq)

Fox viewers were more likely to hold these views even after adjusting for other factors, such as political party membership, and intention to vote for a particular presidental candidate. Fox viewers were unique in that those who paid greater attention to news were moderately more likely to have these misperceptions than those who paid less or no attention to news.

• On June 2004, CEO Roger Ailes responded to some criticism with rebuttal in an online column for the Wall Street Journal ([16]), claiming that Fox's critics intentionally confuse opinion shows such as The O'Reilly Factor with regular news coverage. Ailes claimed that Fox News has broken stories which turned out harmful to Republicans and the Republican Party, stating "Fox News is the network that broke George W. Bush's DUI four days before the election" as an example. The story on Bush's drunk driving record was actually broken by Portland, Maine Fox affiliate WPXT, which while a local affiliate, is not the Fox News Channel cable network. Ailes' statements were contradictory, given Fox News has always stressed that affiliates are separate entities from Fox News Channel, and Fox News has no editorial oversight of any Fox affiliate. [17]

Alleged Violations of Journalistic Ethics

• A ruling in a whistleblower lawsuit that WTVT had ordered fired reporters Jane Akre and Steve Wilson to distort the facts in a story about Bovine Growth Hormone. WTVT successfully appealed on First Amendment grounds. This case was against a local affiliate station, not Fox News. Appeal Decision (PDF)

• That John Prescott Ellis, a full cousin of George W. Bush, was one of four consultants assigned by the Voter News Service to Fox News on night of the 2000 Presidential election; thus he was part of the team that recommended Fox News be the last to retract its call of Florida for Gore and the first to call Florida for Bush, which Fox News did at 2:16 a.m [18]. Though all major networks called Florida for Bush by 2:20 a.m., Ellis has since admitted to informing both Jeb and George Bush several times by telephone of how projections were going on election night. [19]

• Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, a documentary film on Fox News by Robert Greenwald, makes allegations of bias in Fox News by interviewing a number of former employees who discuss the company's practices. For example, Frank O'Donnell, a former employee identified as "FOX News producer", says: "We were stunned, because up until that point, we were allowed to do legitimate news. Suddenly, we were ordered from the top to carry [...] Republican, right-wing propaganda," after being told what to say about Ronald Reagan. O'Donnell actually worked for Washington, D.C. Fox affiliate WTTG, which while a local affiliate, is not the Fox News Channel cable network. Fox News has always stressed that affiliates are separate entities from Fox News Channel, and Fox News has no editorial oversight of any Fox affiliate. The network made an official response and a review of selected employees featured in the film and their employment (or non-employment) with Fox News. Not entirely sure whether to put this here or in the "straight news bias" section.

• A news article in October 2004 by Carl Cameron, chief political correspondent of Fox News, containing three fabricated quotes attributed to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. The quotes included: "Women should like me! I do manicures," "Didn't my nails and cuticles look great?" and "I'm metrosexual [Bush's] a cowboy." Fox News retracted the story and apologized, citing a "jest" that became published through "fatigue and bad judgement, not malice."

• An opinion piece on the Hutton Inquiry decision, in which John Gibson said the BBC had "a frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Americanism that was obsessive, irrational and dishonest" and that the BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan, "insisted on air that the Iraqi Army was heroically repulsing an incompetent American Military" [20]. In reviewing viewer complaints, Ofcom (the United Kingdom's statutory broadcasting regulator) ruled that Fox News had breached the program code in three areas: "respect for truth," "opportunity to take part," and "personal view programmes opinions expressed must not rest upon false evidence." Fox News admitted that Gilligan had not actually said the words that John Gibson appeared to attribute to him; OfCom rejected the claim that it was intended to be a paraphrase. (see Ofcom complaint, response and ruling).