FAIR: "Right-Wing Tilt on Sunday Morning"

[alp227]

Lawmakers talking about U.S. policy issues are the bread and butter of the Sunday morning news shows—NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday. An Extra! study of the lawmakers who appear on these shows finds they have voting records that tilt to the right.

Extra! studied the guests on these four programs from January 25, 2009—the first show after Obama’s inauguration—until April 25, 2010, more than a year into his administration. Guests who were current members of the Senate or House of Representatives, or former members since 2001, were tallied by voting record (in the 111th Congress or, for former lawmakers, the most recent available) according to the VoteView system.

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The average VoteView score of lawmaker guests was 56—five-and-a-half points to the right of a random selection of lawmaker guests. All the shows except Face the Nation, whose lawmakers averaged a score of 49, had a conservative lean. Both Meet the Press and This Week’s lawmakers had an average score of 55. Fox News Sunday’s lawmakers had an average score of 63.

The one show whose lawmaker guests matched the ideological balance of Congress, Face the Nation, featured considerably more Democratic than Republican lawmakers: 57 percent, including independents who caucused with the Democrats. (This is similar to the proportion of Democrats in the 111th Congress, who accounted for 59 percent of both House members and senators, counting allied independents, during the period studied.) Roughly half of This Week and Meet the Press’s lawmaker guests were Democrats—51 percent on each show. Fox News Sunday’s lawmakers, by contrast, were 59 percent Republican and 41 percent Democratic.

On all four shows, Democrats were typically closer to the congressional center than Republicans.

--snip--

But it’s harder to explain Fox News Sunday’s ideological bias: Its Republican lawmakers had an average VoteView score of 84, compared to 34 for its Democrats; the Fox Republicans were 18 points further from the center than the show’s Democrats.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4148

[WCGreen]

1. And they wonder why their ratings are down...

[Sherman A1]

2. I have to wonder

just why any Democrat would bother going on any Fox program?

Really what would be the point?

[Enthusiast]

3. Yes, what is the point?

Why give them the credibility when they are deserving of none.