Thursday, 15 October 2009

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  A Liberal Look at Fox News

  In this age of free wi-fi, Twitter, and 3G telecommunications, we live in an era where communication is easy and information is abundant and accessible.  Consequently, we live in a time where people are more apt to have an opinion about everything.  This is generally good, but sometimes it’s kind of weird.  For example, I don’t know why I know so much about a guy named “Jon” and his wife named “Kate.”  I don’t know why I know so much about a girl named Lauren Conrad or something named “Speidi.”  All I know is that I hate both Jon and Kate, but I kind of like LC, even though I’ve never seen one goddamn episode of either Jon and Kate Plus Eight or The Hills.  The barrage of information that is readily available to us has seemingly been absorbed by my brain through simple osmosis, and I’m forced to have an opinion about things I normally don’t care about.  Active thinking seems to be a thing of the past, or something that only philosophy majors or socialists can do.

  One day I decided to actively formulate opinions on current events, so I tuned in to a news channel that I’ve never watched before.  I turned on the Fox News Channel, and the program that was on was The O’Reilly Factor with Bill O’Reilly.  At the moment I tuned in, Mr. O’Reilly was in the middle of an editorial in which he was talking about the differences between FNC and the other cable news channels.  He claimed that FNC differed from other news channels in that they had a fair and balanced approach to journalism.  While other networks claimed that FNC had a politically conservative bias, he countered by saying that FNC had no bias at all.  Rather, he said that other networks had a liberal outlook on their news stories, but that FNC reported news how Americans want it to be reported.  To justify his claim, he said that Fox News was ahead of all the other news channels in television ratings, thus illustrating that more Americans prefer FNC as their news source than any other channel. 

  O’Reilly’s statements about the ratings intrigued me, so I looked on the internet to verify what he said. I discovered that FNC was, in fact, the number one cable news channel.  Its closest competitor was CNN, which still had only a third of FNC’s total viewership.  Other channels such as MSNBC, CNBC, and CNN Headline News don’t even come close to FNC’s ratings.   IT turns out that Bill O’Reilly was right in that regard; more people watch FNC than any other cable news channel.  This would lead you to believe that more Americans prefer FNC’s brand of reporting, which O’Reilly asserted was strikingly different from the other networks.

  However, a different story will be told if you look more closely at the ratings.  While FNC can boast that they are the most watched cable news channel, it only enjoys somewhere between 40-45% of cable news’ total viewership.  This means that 55-60% of cable news viewers prefer to watch their news from somewhere else.  And if there is such a stark difference in the type of reporting between FNC and all the other channels, as O’Reilly himself asserted, then it seems as if majority of Americans choose not to watch FNC’s brand of journalism or political outlook.  FNC is the news channel that is out-of-touch with mainstream America.
  

  Today, it’s easy to get information, which sadly means that we have more chances to be gullible. 

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