Fox news editor openly caught slanting the story

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201012150004

http://climateprogress.org/2010/12/15/leaked-email-fox-news-sammon-cast-doubt-on-climate-science/

Naughty naughty.

Predict shit-storm in three...two...

QUICKLY someone say something about MSNBC so it looks like tvtropes is fair and balanced.

Dude, nothing new, they've had people tell their pundits how best to trick the audience into believing their bs. And the memos have been out.

Fox news is build of lies.

Disregard.

edited 16th Dec '10 4:11:09 AM by Pentadragon

The best part is how their audience will keep eating the bullshit Fox is feeding them like nothing happened at all.

Uhh.. what's so special about that (refering to op)? It would be news to me that there are established information media who DON'T do this. The only difference is imho that you think the oppinion that gets supported there is retarded.

edited 16th Dec '10 4:57:59 AM by Uchuujinsan

Fox News lost their plausible deniability years ago. Now, everyone knows they are deliberately slanted and that's how their viewers like it.

Umm... all news networks slant their stories to appeal more to their audience. Not just Fox. MSNBC, CBS, CNN. All do it. Duh. This isn't news.

edited 16th Dec '10 7:20:45 AM by Bur

That it was caught on email is. I'd figure that an editor would know to be more discreet.

I'd also figure climate scientists would know to be more discreet. Never stopped them though, and now look at the state of the bloody Global Warming debate. Baw, it's a cabal of evil scientists etc. etc.

Yeah, I suppose it is significant that slanting has actually been recorded from the editor. Obviously everyone knows it's slanted in any case. Hard to imagine the editor not knowing what was going on, endorsing and pushing that agenda.

Is this one of the 'big' Fox news dudes or is it some local spin-off Fox news? I have no idea which are which, who has responsibility for whose actions etc., I keep hearing about local 'Fox' news anchors who have nothing (k, little) to do with Fox at all.

Umm... all news networks slant their stories to appeal more to their audience. Not just Fox. MSNBC, CBS, CNN. All do it. Duh. This isn't news.

No?

Maybe, that is how it is in America, but in other countries that's illegal and causes you to get shut down by the regulatory agency for lying.

Networks are allowed to lie. In fact, it was a case against Fox that created that precedent.

^^
Well, depends - but in this case they didn't exactly ask to lie. But the chief of a news outlet will always influence how something gets reported, with or without lies. And that isn't illegal.

Everyone already knows Fox News is a lying liar that lies. The only people who don't are those who choose to willingly disregard being lied to because it fits their world view. And for those people, no amount of evidence is sufficient, because they'll always justify it by saying the other networks are just as bad, regardless of whether it's true or not.

Bottom line: Fox is no longer CAPABLE of losing face from things like this, because it has already lost as much credibility as it is possible for an organization to lose through its own actions.

And yet people still treat it as a valid news source, instead of on the same level as Weekly World News.

edited 16th Dec '10 9:05:21 AM by EnglishIvy

I think infotainment is a more appropriate word for Fox.

I don't know why you're getting up in arms over "slanting" facts. Fox news makes shit up on a regular basis. See: Inserting footage of Sarah Palin's rallies when talking about the huge line ups for her book.

Even NPR does this to an extent. How much they do it or not is debatable. I'd like to think that NPR does it less than others.

Yeah but it's not binary. It isn't "biased and not biased", it's a varying level of bias. There's a difference between say BBC speaking with a British perspective versus someone deliberating attempting to sabotage a debate by explicitly telling their journalists to insert weasel words to skew the dialogue.

When the viewpoint of a huge portion of Fox's viewer base is "batshit insane and in denial about reality" (see, for example, Birthers)...

Fox gives us the "Parallel universe where we're actually right and the facts are wrong" perspective.

edited 16th Dec '10 12:49:14 PM by Yamikuronue

I like it when I manage to snag the BBC stuff on Hawaii Public Radio. Different issues, different perspectives.

Al Jazeera is becoming quite popular these days, it's even coming to Canada. It's basically a BBC spinoff with some CBC (chief editor went to there) added in. I like different perspectives, gives you more information on any event.

I know there are going to be people who call this a stupid question, but how unbalanced is Fox's news? As of three or four years ago, they kept a strong division between their pundits (who were openly biased) and their news sources (which one study described as the least biased among American television-based news providers, albeit still biased.)

edited 16th Dec '10 4:46:53 PM by feotakahari

Well it's not banned or anything but it is not allowed to be called news around here. It's specifically entertainment and I think that is similar to everywhere else. People who pirate American signals can get Fox News, but most other countries, from what I can tell, don't normally carry it.

The internationally trusted new sources are BBC, Al Jazeera, France 24, Al-Arabiya and CNN. There might be some other less well known ones, but those are the big ones.

^^ Their news reporting is pretty neutral on most things. Especially if they have alternative source assistance like from say the Associated Press.

{Kep threads separate, please, and don't bring sniping from one into another. —Madrugada}

Yeah, they're real neutral. Little flubs like reporting a 200 million dollar daily expenditure for the president's trip to India, those are just flukes. It's not like Fox News habitually misrepresents anyone and anything that isn't aligned with its agenda in the name of getting higher ratings.

edited 17th Dec '10 7:54:13 AM by Madrugada