Home > Trying to gauge the `Fox Factor’
Critics slam Fox News for toeing White House line. But do Americans expect more spin with their news?
by TIM HARPER
WASHINGTON?As U.S. and Iraqi fighters surrounded Moqtada al-Sadr in Najaf last week, Fox News viewers were given three takes on what the Americans should do next.
Or, as Fox likes to put it, what the "good guys" should do about the "bad guys."
Over the afternoon, the foreign policy debate went something like this:
Retired U.S. Army Col. David Hunt told the cable network al-Sadr should be brought out "on a plate."
Bernard Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner and an adviser to the Bush campaign, said: "I think it’s time, he’s got to be taken out."
Retired Maj.-Gen. Robert Scales: "He’s simply got to go down."
Fox did bring on Michael O’Hanlon, a respected analyst at the non-partisan Brookings Institution to discuss al-Sadr and all interviewers did acknowledge that the U.S. military mustn’t storm a holy shrine.
But was it the "Fair and Balanced" coverage that the Fox slogan promises?
No, says a growing legion of critics that condemns the network for parroting Republican ideology, waving the flag and glorifying American military might.
It is a view that has gained increasing currency with the surprising popularity of Outfoxed, filmmaker Robert Greenwald’s detailed look at Fox’s slavish adherence to the White House line.
Democrats have seized on the issue, with members of Congress demanding that Rupert Murdoch, chair of the network’s parent company, abandon a campaign of "improving the president’s standing with the American people on the basis of not news, but disinformation."
The right-wing network that has learned that, as a former producer says, "there is money in the flag," is under unprecedented attack.
But with a multiplicity of news sources available during this election season, some observers suggest that more and more Americans want ? even expect ? their news with a spin.
Instead of the oft-cited Red (Republican) and Blue (Democrat) states, they say, the country is really breaking down into adherents to Red and Blue media.
The left in this country has author/comedians Al Franken and Bill Maher and filmmaker/ author Michael Moore of Fahrenheit 9/11 fame. The right counters with a lineup that includes the Fox mainstays, Rush Limbaugh and a stable of other radio ranters. And rarely do these two solitudes interact.
With the presidential election a mere 10 weeks away, switching the channel may be too easy because some believe there is a "Fox Factor" lurking in this campaign.
The Pew Research Centre, in a major poll released last week, found that, for the first time since the Vietnam War era, foreign affairs and national security issues have emerged as two factors that could decide the race between incumbent George W. Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry.
However, a poll published last fall found that 33 per cent of respondents who used Fox as their prime news source believed the U.S. had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Sixty-six per cent believed Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda and had a hand in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Of those who said their prime news source was the moderate National Public Radio network, only 11 per cent said last autumn they believed weapons of mass destruction had been found and 16 per cent believed Saddam was linked to Al Qaeda.
"You’d be amazed how many Fox viewers think Saddam was flying one of the planes that morning," says Ed Wasserman, a professor of journalistic ethics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va.
"Those numbers are horrifying. The use of facts on the network is so corrupt that, on the central issues of the day, viewers are being deceived.
It is not that difficult for people to get a reasonable view of the world . . .'
Andrew Kohut, Pew Research Centre director
"Now, if you talk to Fox journalists, they will tell you they never reported any of those things. But whatever category the Bush White House wants to put their initiatives in, that's the way the network reports them.
"Their reports from Iraq still use the logoWar on Terror.’"
Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Centre, says any argument that Americans are more or less ill-informed on electoral matters than in the past is "specious."
Says Kohut: "There is more partisanship in the media than in the past, but people still say they want objectivity and not spin.
"It is not that difficult for people to get a reasonable view of the world, because there are more sources of news."
Kohut also says the stakes are so high in this election that more Americans are making the effort to become informed.
Still, his polling also indicates that Republicans, predisposed to believe what they hear on Fox, increasingly turn to that network for their news, while Democrats increasingly turn to CNN.
(Fox has higher ratings when viewership is measured at any point during the day, but CNN has more total viewers on any given day. In the crucial Sunday talk-show arena, Fox places behind NBC, CBS and ABC. It had 1.64 million viewers last Sunday, compared with the 4.28 million who watched Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet The Press.)
A Pew study released in June found that respondents calling themselves conservatives turned to local news (66 per cent), their daily newspaper (61 per cent) and Fox (41 per cent).
Those identifying themselves as liberals got their information and analysis from daily newspapers (56 per cent), local TV news (54 per cent), network evening news (36 per cent), National Public Radio (33 per cent) and CNN (30 per cent).
In another sign that much of the media are preaching to the converted, the Pew study found that 20 per cent of conservatives get their political news from religious radio shows, compared with 7 per cent of liberals.
Twenty-one per cent of conservatives relied on combative conservative Bill O’Reilly of Fox (The O’Reilly Factor), compared with 2 per cent of liberals.
Conversely, 14 per cent of liberals sought information from the Comedy Channel’s satiric Daily Show With Jon Stewart, compared with 2 per cent of conservatives.
Last Thursday, a little slice of Fox (the network that O’Reilly says Ottawa is afraid to allow into Canada) included these highlights:
Analyzing the situation under a "So long Sadr?" logo, retired Col. Hunt told viewers that, if Iran had anything to do with the Najaf standoff, U.S. officials should fly over to Tehran, show them a little videotape of "Shock and Awe" and ask them whether they "wanted a piece of this."
However, he went on to say that he was not advocating an invasion of Iran.
Empty seats at the Athens Olympics indicated that Osama bin Laden must be smiling somewhere because he had scared tourists away from Greece, said host Neil Cavuto.
Howard Safir, another former New York City police commissioner, said he thought another terrorist attack would help Democrats because terrorists believe the Democrats would be softer on them and "I happen to agree with the terrorists."
A discussion on the FBI allegedly harassing protesters in advance of next week’s Republican convention in New York featured author Michelle Malkin (whose most recent book, In Defence Of Internment, defends the wartime rounding-up of Japanese-Americans) excoriating the "whiners on the left" from the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times.
No "whiners" were there to defend themselves, but host John Gibbons said he thought it would be a good idea if the FBI was tricking protesters into promising not to assemble on the New York streets, then arresting them if they showed up.
To be fair, the network’s reporting on the advertising controversy over Kerry’s Vietnam service record was largely even-handed, even though a Kerry’s spokesperson, Stephanie Cutter, told the Washington Post the campaign received calls from concerned war veterans every time one of Kerry’s critics popped up on Fox last week.
Last month, Fox News catapulted itself back into controversy with its coverage of the Democratic convention, which largely consisted commentators talking over speeches and engineering confrontations with left-wing opponents.
The network has promised "No Spin" coverage of next week’s Republican gathering.