Several members of Congress sent a letter Tuesday to Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, to express their opposition to what they say is the network's "unfair and unbalanced" bias towards the Republican Party.
Oh that's just rich! When are we going to see a group of Congressional Republicans sending letters to CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, and MSNBC regarding their liberal bias? I hope it comes soon and I hope it contains several examples. Here's just one as detailed by Neal Boortz:
Allow me to share one particularly interesting study that Bozell presented in his book (Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media -RR). The Clinton years saw the emergence of a man named Larry Klayman and his group Judicial Watch. Judicial Watch filed several lawsuits against the Clinton administration dealing with such things as campaign finance irregularities. The media treatment of Klayman and Judicial Watch was brutal. Time magazine wrote "Even in the fang-bearing world of Bill Clinton's most dedicated pursuers, Larry Klayman is in a class by himself." A review of stories featuring Klayman and Judicial Watch by Bozell's Media Research Center showed that it was a rare occasion indeed when Judicial Watch was mentioned in a network news cast without the accompanying "conservative" label. Things changed, however, in 2002. And why did things change? Because Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against none other than the hated Vice President, Dick Cheney over his connections with Halliburton.
Bozell uses CNN's Judy Woodruff as an example.
- March 3, 1998. Woodruff reports that "lawyers for the conservative group Judicial Watch" had some questions about Bill Clinton and FBI files.
- July 10, 2002. Woodruff, reporting on the lawsuit against Cheney, says "The reviews of President Bush's speech on that subject [corporate responsibility] were still coming in today as a watchdog group said that it was suing Vice President Dick Cheney."
Clever, don't you think? When Judicial Watch sues Clinton, it's a "conservative group." When it sues Cheney, it's a "watchdog group."
There are countless other examples. Simply Googling for "liberal media bias" should produce a rich cornucopia for your perusal.
Now I'm not going to say that Fox News isn't biased and I'm not going to say that the Congresspeople who wrote that letter don't have a point. But let's be clear here that if Fox News is biased toward conservatives, it pales before the liberal bias shown by most of the other networks.
I also wanted to address another section of the article:
A winter 2003-04 poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes consistently found that members of the public whose primary news source is Fox News had a higher rate of misperceptions about Iraq than viewers of any other news source.
Two-thirds of Fox viewers, for example, wrongly believed that a link between Iraq and al-Qaida had been found, while only 16 percent of PBS/NPR viewers and listeners and 40 percent of print-media readers shared the same misperception.
That's because there clearly was a link between Iraq and al-Qaida. The recent report from the Senate Intelligence Committee confirm this as do statements of the 9/11 Commission. There is no evidence of collaboration on attacks against the US, let alone 9/11, but the links were definitely there.
In addition, 33 percent of Fox viewers believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, in contrast with 11 percent of PBS/NPR viewers and 19 percent of ABC News viewers.
That's because they have actually been found. Shells containing sarin and mustard gas for starters. Sure, no stockpiles, but such weapons have been found. It would not surprise me if the questions asked in this poll were phrased such that they would generate the desired outcome. Poll writers have been doing that for years to skew the results in favor of their position. The more I hear about this, the less likely I am to give any credence whatsoever to any poll.
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