Pew Research Finds Opinion Dominates MSNBC More Than Fox News 277
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Jack Mirkinson reports that Pew Research Center's annual "State of the Media" study found that, since 2007, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC have all cut back sharply on the amount of actual reporting found on their airwaves. Cheaper, more provocative debate or interview segments have largely filled the void. Pew found that Fox News spent 55 percent of the time on opinion and 45 percent of the time on reporting. Critics of that figure would likely contend that the network's straight news reporting tilts conservative, but it is true that Fox News has more shows that feature reporting packages than MSNBC does. According to Pew MSNBC made the key decision to reprogram itself in prime time as a liberal counterweight to the Fox News Channel's conservative nighttime lineup. The new MSNBC strategy and lineup were accompanied by a substantial cut in interview time and sharply increased airtime devoted to edited packages. The Pew Research examination of programming in December 2012 found MSNBC by far the most opinionated of the three networks, with nearly 90% of MSNBC's primetime coverage coming in the form of opinion or commentary."
Misleadingly framed poll (again...) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fuck Pew (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But just because it's labelled news (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed
"Democrats fail to undermine Republican policy with lies" vs. "Flaws in Republican scheme ignored, despite Democrat efforts".
(Feel free to switch the names around).
From what I've seen, both MSNBC and Fox are both pretty much all opinion all the time, to the point of being detrimental rather than useless as sources of news.
Re:At least Fox tries to pretend its unbiased (Score:0, Informative)
Whereas Fox has never-ending coverage of why all Democrat policies ...
It's the Democratic Party, and Democratic policies. Using "Democrat" as an adjective is a Republican smear campaign that is partly perpetuated by Fox News. Given your statements above, it sounds like you do watch Fox News a little too much...
Re:Provocative Headline (Score:4, Informative)
Numbers are included to look objective but if you read the footnotes, you can see that the study was designed to generate high numbers for the opinion category. A segment was considered to be opinion if at least 25% of it was opinion. So, if the format in one news organization was for every story to spend 70% of the air-time on fact based news, the study would still show that 0% of the programming was fact based and 100% was opinion. Not exactly the results one would expect. If, on the other hand, a news organization's format was to have 70% of their shows as entirely fact based and 30% as entirely opinion based, the study would report what you would expect: 70% of the programming was fact based. So, in this example, you have two new organizations that both spend 70% of air-time on fact based coverage and the study reports one as 100% opinion and the other is reported as 30% opinion. The numbers can be made to show whatever you want based on how you decide to calculate them.
Re:Misleadingly framed (Score:2, Informative)
You seriously have to be joking. If you want to read http://mediamatters.org/ [mediamatters.org] then go there, if you want to read http://foxnewslies.net/ [foxnewslies.net], if you want to read http://www.politifact.com/ [politifact.com] then go there, if you want to read http://crooksandliars.com/ [crooksandliars.com] then go there. Don't waffle on about Fox not-News and demand people provide examples of Fox not-News blatant propaganda on slashdot, just bloody google it yourself there are thousands of examples, a regular daily act of corporate propaganda.
The reality here Fox not-News dresses up opinion as news whilst the other news channels are clear about what is opinion and what is news.
Here is a couple of links, just so can can go a bit rabid, http://rt.com/ [rt.com] and http://www.aljazeera.com/ [aljazeera.com], go for it ;D.