Fox News Creating Political Ads

The Fox morning show Fox & Friends aired a four minute video attacking President Obama's term in office that was created by Fox News executives.




Fox News, which is continually criticized for its right-leaning reporting, is the highest watched news channel in the nation. This is a problem when American journalism purports itself as unbiased, and Fox news itself claims to be "fair and balanced." Fox executives claim that they had no knowledge of the video, that they dealt with it, and that they subsequently removed the video. This is not the first time that Fox has produced an attack ad against Obama; they played one before his State of the Union Address in January.

According to this article in MediaMatters,

The network helped launch the tea party movement, was instrumental in Republicans taking back the House in 2010, and basically served as the unofficial venue for the 2012 Republican presidential primary. 

This brings up the question of bias in journalism--if overtly biased sources can claim to be journalism and news, can news claim to be unbiased?

Balanced vs. Biased

In class this past week, we discussed Andrew Sullivan's The Dish (http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/) as biased and balanced. He explains that journalism should always present both sides and be neutral, but that it is almost impossible to do so. Although this is the sad reality that it's difficult for something to be presented fairly, he foregrounds his bias and admits to it. Possibly the most infamous source for republican bias news coverage is one of the largest TV news stations that reports online as well. For a very long time now, Fox News (http://www.foxnews.com/) has proven to support right wing views and opinions in the majority of the stories they cover. They have also been accused of flat out lying, and framing content to create a completely different story than actuality. Despite this widespread knowledge of misinformation, they refer to themselves as "Fair & Balanced" and many people still turn to them as their major source of news/information. On their website there's an "Opinion" (http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/index.html) tab where a variety of articles and videos are posted. Although the content under this tab is classified as "Opinion", the way the articles include statistics and the twisting of information is very sneaky and makes it seem factual, as many of their supposed non-opinion articles do. Sadly, on their website there is no room for disputes or opposing views of readers to discuss the topics- making everything much more persuasive by presenting one side as inclusive of all facts and information. Many people such as myself, wouldn't even refer to Fox as a real news station but more of a form of entertainment. Although many journalists, such as Andrew Sullivan, explain that you cannot not be somewhat biased, the difference is embracing that specific news does take a particular stance- rather than masking opinionated content as truthful, real, complete, information.