The City County Observer as a promoter of good public policy was not surprised to see the first punch from the United States Senate thrown at the widely viewed networks MSNBC and Fox News. As we are for open and honest dialog on the local, state, and national levels. We support the right to free speech and encourage people to think for themselves.
Increasingly it seems that both MSNBC and Fox News play to the audience as opposed to reporting the news in an unbiased manner. These two networks on the contrary cloak themselves as credible news agencies while bombarding the public with biased and opinionated rhetoric. The public seems to eat it up as is evidenced by the high viewer ratings.
When cigarettes were discovered to be damaging to the public’s health, the government stepped in and forced a health disclaimer to be printed on each pack. Perhaps such a disclaimer should appear in the tag lines on television entertainment that masquerades as news.
The disclaimer:
“the contents of the show you are watching are not news and have been known to cause people to make illogical and incorrect conclusions based on thin or fabricated evidence”
seems to be a first step worth considering.
So, O’Reilly and Mathews, Scholtz and Greta, Rachel, Kieth, Beck, and Hannity had better be on their toes. Senator Rockefeller seems to see the lot of them as similar and hazardous to the public’s mental health and in many cases the Senator is probably correct. In their defense, none of them claim to be journalists. They know what they are and they are quite pleased and well paid for the entertainment they sell to society as news.
Here is a link to the full story with a video.
http://www.westernjournalism.com/sen-rockefeller-suggests-eliminating-fox-msnbc/
If they try and deprive me of Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow, they’ll have to pry my cold dead fingers off my remote control!
I don’t think they will. The Senator is simply making a point that neither of those stations are really anything but non-stop editorial comments. They should all be able to say their piece but not pretend to be what they are not.
The hosts of the programs I watch on MSNBC make absolutely no bones about their shows being commentary and not “NEWS” broadcasts. If someone wants NEWS, he or she should tune into Jim Lehrer Report on PBS rather than FOX or MSNBC. I mean how low on the dodo scale does one have to be to not know ahead of time what to expect when tuning into those two networks? I sure don’t need some rich, white, corporatist Democrat senator to tell me that.
Many people are confused by both networks. The hosts really do know that they are basically opinion columnists with a TV show. The problem is with the viewers not realizing that. How low on the dodo scale is a good question. I suspect that we as a nation that needs a great educational system may not like the answer.
Well, I’m not ready to relinguish my rights to information, opinion, satire, or whatever else comes in the form of political commentary just because the slobbering herd has been socially and culturally labotomized.
me either
CCO, you’re dead wrong on this issue. Fox is the voice conservatives never had while so-called “journalists” spewed bias for twenty years. Unbiased journalism is a lie perpetuated by Dan Rather and his gang of “unbiased journalists.” We were never provided “the other side” until Fox started reporting it.
CCO….I was a true follower of your every word until this article. You are now starting to sound like all of the other liberal media outlets. Are you telling me that a disclaimer needs to preface the Fox News shows? I’m not intelligent enough to make a decision or come to logical conclusions. Come on….I guess the next thing your going to tell me is that Charles Rangle is a great and honest man. Fox News fabricated all the evidence on him because their news and organization is racist.
There was allot of tongue in cheek humor going on that article.
I guess the same standards can be applied to Public Broadcasting as well right Dems?!?
While I agree that each network has a slant there are some big differences in the networks.
1) Fox has sued for the right to lie to it’s viewers.
2) Fox allows politcal candidates, so far only republicans, a platform
for their views, unheard of in journalism before Fox.
3) MSNBC’s analysts do present some things in a slanted way and often
take scarcastic shots at Republicans but do so for what they
believe is republican hypocrisy.
4) Fox engages to a much greater degree in demogoguery and
demonization of Democratic officials and spokespeople rather than
analysis.
5) Fox’s programs are much more misleading than MSNBC’s.
Example: I’m sure the vast majority of Fox viewers believe that
Acorn committed voter fraud, when in fact Acorn has and was never
found guilty of voter fraud.
Numerous independent polls show that Fox News viewer are among the
most misinformed about national and international affairs.
MSNBC’s viewers only scored slightly better.
This is just one such poll. http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/16/daily-show-fox-knowledge/
I do admit that the country, especially the politcally motivated, seems to go home each night and settle into their respective ideological corners and tune in to hear what they want to hear and that can’t be good for our national discourse.
Yes it is true the each side to some degree does demogogue and demonize the other, but as our parents said, just because the other fellow does it doesn’t make it right.
Let’s hope that it doesn’t get so bad that the day of the FCC coming in to regulate these networks doesn’t arrive.
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