Fox News Is The Most-Watched Network, Even By The Left! :-D

[WhiteHotAfterburner]

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Fox leads for trust

Americans do not trust the major tv news operations in the country- except for Fox News.

Our newest survey looking at perceptions of ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News finds Fox as the only one that more people say they trust than distrust. 49% say they trust it to 37% who do not.

CNN does next best at a 39/41 spread, followed by NBC at 35/44, CBS at 32/46, and ABC at 31/46.

Predictably there is a lot of political polarization in which outlets people trust. 74% of Republicans trust Fox News, but no more than 23% trust any of the other four sources. We already knew that conservatives don't trust the mainstream media but this data is a good prism into just how deep that distrust runs.

For Democrats the numbers are a complete opposite- a majority trust all of ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC while only 30% have faith in Fox News. Continuing the trend in our polling over the last few months that independents hate everything, a plurality of them distrust all five outlets we looked at.

NBC is the most popular choice among Democrats at a 62/17 spread. Although 'NBC News' was the entity named in the question it's possible respondents could have been lumping MSNBC in with it given the good numbers on the left. At a 17/69 spread CBS was the least popular with Republicans, perhaps indicating residual unhappiness from the Dan Rather days. CNN finished second among Democrats, Republicans, and independents suggesting that it may be the least polarizing of the major tv news operations.

These numbers suggest quite a shift in what Americans want from their news. A generation ago Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in the country because of his neutrality. Now people trust Fox the most precisely because of its lack of neutrality. It says a lot about where journalism is headed.

Full results http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/ ... al_126.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Fox The Most Trusted News Source

,
WHAB

[Maribou Stork]

The link uses a ? mark when referring to Fox as the most trusted news source. The poll may show more about how gullible Americans are, than proving anything about what news sources are reliable.

[A Bloke Down The Pub]

The poll may show more about how gullible Americans are, than proving anything about what news sources are reliable.

Nail head hit.

[J.D.]

One possible reason why FOX News (not to be confused with the entire FOX News Channel) is the most trusted is that it does give the most fair and most balanced coverage of news.

I would have to research some to find it again so I could give actual percentages but during the last campaign season and independent group that monitors news channels and other news outlets said that FOX News gave the most equal amount of air time to each candidate of any televised news outlet and also the most equal amount of air time in the percentage of time given to each candidate that was negative or positive in nature.

Other channels, among them the ones mentioned in the article above, were extremely biased and lopsided in their coverage giving most all of their coverage to Democrats and most of that coverage was positive in nature and what little time they gave to Republican candidates was highly negative.

If someone is capable of separating the political entertainment programs on FOX News Channel from actual FOX News broadcasts they will find that it is as it is called, the most fair and balanced new of any televised news outlet. Unfortunately for FOX News is that most people just have to lump it together with all the political entertainment shows that are aired on the FOX News Channel and use them to attempt to discredit FOX News itself.

[Maribou Stork]

Fox was found to be more biased in this study.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... l-election" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Nothing ratchets up the perennial debate over media bias like a presidential election. But as Tim Groeling, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, observes, public discussions about media bias are often just “food fights,” with pundits and partisans throwing around anecdotes.

Groeling is hoping to advance scientific (and public) knowledge beyond this mush with research he used to demonstrate selection bias in television networks’ decision to run or withhold the results of presidential approval polls. For an article appearing in Presidential Studies Quarterly this December, Groeling designed a method to deal with a problem that often besets research on the media: people can identify all the news that journalists saw fit to print, but it’s more difficult to determine what they chose to ignore.

To counter the problem of the “unobserved population,” Groeling collected two different data sets: in-house presidential approval polling by ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX News and the networks’ broadcasts of such polls on evening news shows from January 1997 to February 2008. Groeling found that, with varying degrees of statistical significance, CBS, NBC and ABC showed what Groeling calls a pro-Democrat bias. For instance, CBS was 35 percent less likely to report a five-point drop in approval for Bill Clinton than a similar rise in approval and was 33 percent more likely to report a five-point drop than a rise for George W. Bush. Meanwhile FOX News showed a statistically significant pro-Republican bias in the most controlled of the three models Groeling tested: its Special Report program was 67 percent less likely to report a rise in approval for Clinton than a decrease and 36 percent more likely to report the increase rather than the decrease for Bush.

Groeling’s work is one of the few studies to quantify partisan bias in the media, a subject notoriously difficult for social scientists to research and discuss. These scientists work with theories such as the socalled hostile media effect to predict that ardent supporters of a cause will view media as slanted for the other side, and they have conducted hundreds of studies that have revealed imbalances in the ways journalists frame news on topics ranging from AIDS to the war in Iraq. But there is not a cohesive literature on media bias. Maxwell McCombs of the University of Texas at Austin, who pioneered agenda-setting theory, one of the leading paradigms on news media, says that a researcher would need a few years to make sense of existing data and develop an approach to study media bias. Like many scholars, McCombs sees “bias” as a loaded term, preferring to speak of journalists’ “predilections.”

“Scholars hate the word ‘bias’ because they feel like they’re entering the ideological fray,” says S. Robert Lichter, head of the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) at George Mason University, who prefers the term “tone.” Despite his efforts, Lichter himself got sucked into that fray. His content analysis of the transcripts of TV news broadcasts at the statement level is a respected and widely adopted methodology. This past summer, just as the view that journalists were going softer on Barack Obama than on John McCain was becoming widely accepted, CMPA issued a report showing that 72 percent of the statements in TV news reports about Obama in late spring and early summer were negative, whereas 57 percent of the statements about McCain were negative. When Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly attacked Lichter’s method during a radio interview, saying it would embolden liberal bias, Lichter responded, “You can take all my studies or none of my studies”—an allusion to past uses of his work to support conservative views.

[ben ttech]

the second question " which fox program do you get your news from?"
and 98% of them picked an entertainment lineup...

[Maribou Stork]

Fox News Channel has also never had to pull a story that I know of. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC all have had to broadcast retractions after getting the story wrong, or in some cases just outright manufacturing a story.

They had to retract a story about Kevin Jennings....remember that one?

[ben ttech]

there IS a good reason "video new reports" were outlawed...
public enemy #2

their repeaters, public enemy #1

[messy slob]

FOX CNN MSNBC ETC. are ENTERTAINMENT nothing more....the only debate here is style of the bullshit you get from those sources.


I will say however FOX came the closest to actually reporting news 2 times that I know of. But still they are probably staffed with more idiots than any of there peers.

1. The Israeli Spy story right after 911 which they pulled shortly after it ran.

2. A live broadcast from New Orleans during Katrina where liar and corporate pimp Shepard Smith was visibly shaken when he learned of a way out of the Superdome area over a functioning bridge.....that was blocked by soldiers with shoot to kill orders. On the other side of the bridge was everything the dying, sick and hungry people trapped in N.O. needed. The fact that our government would shoot anyone who tried to use the bridge really got old Shep fired up and Hannity back in the studio had to cut away and go in to hyper spin mode. Great stuff, very honest.

[bubbabush]

among those who trust a television news corporation to tell them what's true. A high honor indeed.

~O~