Non-biased reporting produces better ratings

By Tom Quiner

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Fox News has triple the audience as CNN.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism publishes a report titled “The State of the News Media.” Their 2012 report revealed that the Fox News Channel had 1.9 million viewers compared to 689,000 viewers for CNN.

The graphic above might explain why.

Note the CNN slant to the left?

My liberal friends are quick to point out that Fox is slanted to the right. No doubt.

But Bill O’Reilly and company aren’t news shows. They are political entertainment.

When straight news is dispensed by Fox’s Shepard Smith or Bret Baier, it is far less colored than the rest of the mainstream media (see above).

Even more, Fox is less likely to downplay or suppress stories that make a liberal president look bad. A recent example: Grubergate.

A media analyst, Geoffrey Dickens of the Media Research Center, pointed out the disconnect in the way the mainstream media reports news vs. Fox News:

“Just imagine the reaction of the liberal media if a video had surfaced of a George W. Bush administration official admitting that “lack of transparency” was “a huge political advantage” in selling the Iraq war and that they relied on the “stupidity of the American voter” to launch an attack on Iraq? That video would be everywhere.

However, the clip of ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber using those exact phrases in talking about the passage of the Affordable Care Act has yet to be reported on ABC or NBC’s evening or morning shows. The sum total of Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) network coverage was a 2 minute, 50 second segment on Thursday’s CBS This Morning – six days after the tape was first discovered. On the print side the Washington Post offered a front page story on Gruber on Thursday. But the Gruber comment has yet to show up in the pages of The New York TimesUSA Today, the Los Angeles Times or even the Associated Press.

Public broadcasting has been a no-show as well, with no Gruber mentions on PBS or NPR.”

Obamacare was based on lies and sold to us through the proactive use of deceit.

The MSM yawned over the story.

Evidently, they think we’re too stupid to care.

Considering the ratings gap between Fox and the rest of the MSM, they might want to rethink their bias.

 

10 Comments

  1. jamesbeckhamreal on December 1, 2014 at 9:30 am

    CNN, what a joke. Those people couldn’t pull off an unbiased report if their lives depended on it.



  2. Lisa Bourne on December 1, 2014 at 9:42 am

    I’m not a gigantic Fox News Channel fan. I wish they could deliver the news and commentary with a little less cheese and cheesecake, and without cornering the market on one shade of ash blonde hair toner. But outside this, two glaring facts remain: the so-called mainstream media long ago surrendered any credibility and arrived at stinking to high heaven status, from where it coughs and wheezes it’s way daily ever closer to oblivion; and, the only reason Fox News seems as far right as it does is because of how unappealingly far left the rest of the media machine is.



    • quinersdiner on December 1, 2014 at 9:44 am

      I do agree. Fox does love blondes, that’s for sure. Your last sentence really says it.



  3. danallosso on December 1, 2014 at 9:44 am

    Actually, the CNN headline is factual. Just because you’re uncomfortable with those fact does not make the headline slanted.



    • quinersdiner on December 1, 2014 at 9:50 am

      The insertion of the words “black” and “white” suggests otherwise. The use of the word “unarmed” may be accurate, but slants the headline since evidence suggests Michael Brown charged the police officer.



      • danallosso on December 1, 2014 at 10:30 am

        I tend to agree with John Stewart, that often the 24-hour political news stations are more sloppy and sensationalistic than motivated by an overarching political agenda. I’m no CNN fan, but “Black” and “White” are also facts. You may consider them irrelevant to the case, but still facts, and probably quite relevant in what happened after. As, I think, is the fact that one party was unarmed and the other apparently had only a gun accessible, and no non-lethal options.

        Incidentally, I’ve just started using a web-based news aggregator, and I have to say I’m surprised how many FOX stories I end up reading. They are GREAT on science, technology, space, and history news — on many subjects that interest me more than politics.



      • stevegreer1 on December 2, 2014 at 7:24 am

        I agree with Tom that the words “white” and “black” are completely irrelevant in this case. There is absolutely ZERO fact-based evidence that this was a racially motivated shooting. CNN is only using those words to further fan the flames of racial discontent. Fox News was able to get the news of the no indictment out without resorting to such tactics.



      • danallosso on December 2, 2014 at 8:38 am

        Steve, Even if I stipulated for sake of argument that race was irrelevant in the grand jury’s decision or in the shooting, are you saying race is irrelevant in making this event news? People get shot every day. Why do you think the events in Ferguson are being discussed by people all over the world?

        I think you’re confusing what you want to be true with what is.



  4. […] light of my previous post today, CNN deserves credit for taking on this politically-incorrect story. CNN’s Victor Blackwell […]



  5. oarubio on December 2, 2014 at 9:06 pm

    Teflon is great for kitchenware, but it makes for lousy presidents when their lies don’t stick. It creates an oblivious citizenry less likely to make good decisions in the voting booth.