OK, now I'm scared.

[Jackpine Radical]

http://www.alternet.org/media/150251/scary%3A_people_who_watch_and_trust_fox_news_will_surprise_you/

Scary: People Who Watch and Trust Fox News Will Surprise You

One in four Americans believes "most or all" of what's said on Fox News, despite Fox's fabrication of everything from death panels to Climategate.
March 14, 2011 |


In the 7 March issue of the Tribune, Mark Seddon reported on the threat that Glenn Beck, "as a sort of hired gauleiter on Fox News", poses to American democracy. The article hit the nail on the head when it comes to Beck's paranoiac propaganda. Seddon, however, misses the broader danger of the Murdoch-owned Fox News: the media outlet's audience is growing even as its programming veers away from broadcast journalism and shapes instead a rightwing political operation.

Consider the facts: more than twice as many Americans watch Fox News as watch CNN, the next most popular cable news channel, and almost five times as many as watch MSNBC. Fox's audience cuts across age, gender, race, education, and income level. The average Fox News viewer is a male between the ages of 30 to 49 -- far from most people's perception that mostly seniors watch Fox. So where Seddon pointed to a fabled minority audience of "not-so-bright … American citizens", Fox is instead popular among a wide swath of well-educated, contributing members of society. Fox's audience includes your neighbour, your cousin and the guy in front of you in line every morning at Starbucks.

This growing audience also puts significant faith in the credibility of the news delivered by Fox, even while trust in other major news outlets declines. Fox is among the most trusted news outlets in the US, despite countless demonstrable instances of their anchors and pundits spreading misinformation. This rise in influence is not an accident or a coincidence. It is the result of a sophisticated strategy to gain market dominance through an almost monopolistic aggregation of media platforms in individual markets, an aggressive strategy of cross-marketing between entertainment and news, and a systematic denigration by Fox News on air of all other outlets.

Fox's pre-eminent position has had an irrefutable and destructive impact on the state of political discourse in the United States. Since its inception, Fox News has performed as a political party, not as an objective journalistic outlet. Since President Obama took office, Fox has succeeded not only in spreading misinformation and lies, but also in entrenching those fictions so that its audience relates to them as irrefutable fact. One in four Americans believes "most or all" of what's said on Fox News, despite Fox's fabrication of everything from death panels to Climategate. (Coined by Sarah Palin, the term "death panels" -- an inaccurate claim that the healthcare reform bill would require end-of-life counseling -- was picked up by Fox to advance the provocative and false threat that the government would "tell grandma and grandpa… how and when to die". Climategate is Fox's name for the so-called scandal in which emails -- stolen and then distorted -- from the UK's Climate Research Unit suggested that "scientists are fudging data to make their case for global warming", when the "evidence isn't really there.")

[shraby]

1. Another side to Fox news on the internet, Mr Shraby reads it

because he said CNN news and MSNBC news are set up with a lot of videos with advertisements to start them and Fox news isn't. He doesn't like the ads and doesn't like everything with videos.
Ease of use is his aim and I would guess a lot of older people do the same with the online news.
When will the other two buy a clue? People don't like advertising everyplace they look.

edited to add.

[Armstead]

2. At least 25 percent of Americans have always bought that kind of Crap, but ...

It does point out the dangers of media consolidatio.

It is sickening how government has sat back and allowed moguls like Mudoch and faceless Monopolistic Corporations to get such total control over the media.

We should have done something as these Media Empires were being assembled....But alas, our politicians STILL sit back and allow people like Murdoch and Comcast to hijack the phlox communications infrastructure.

[bvar22]

10. Our politicians didn't just "sit back",

they actively assisted them in exchange for cash.
The WORST was the "Telecommunications Act of 1996", passed by Republican & "Centrist" Democrats, and signed by Bill Clinton.

[Armstead]

13. May be true -- Whatever their motivation it was a terrible thing

[JackintheGreen]

3. We need to follow Canada's lead on this

and make it illegal for news outlets to broadcast intentionally false OR EVEN MISLEADING information.

[madmax]

4. Sounds simple and straight forward to me

so why hasn't it been done?

That pesky First Amendment?

[JackintheGreen]

6. You got me

just last month the ban/penalties were upheld in the face of a petition lodged by a group that wants to start a FOX-like channel.

They'll cry 1st amendment, but the fact is that they would still be able to broadcast anything they want. They just couldn't call it "news." And if they did they could be fined or, ultimately, lose their license. So many of their talking heads call themselves "opinion" anyway. It would be an easy switch in reality. But the MSM is unwilling to call them liars, even when so many online sources can quantify the lies point by point by bloody point.

[madmax]

12. Perhaps, no has yet challenged them via the court.

So many issues and causes, so little time.

I admire those who devote their lives to making the world a beter place.

[haikugal]

8. YES!!!

[Siouxmealso]

5. Fox is actually helped by their competitors

Articles such as this one aren't going to reduce Fox's viewership, imho. If anything it'll cause curious people to check them out to see what all the fuss is about.

I watch Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC every evening, but good lord, not a day goes by when he's not giving a free promo to Glen Beck or Bill O'Reilly for the latest outrageous thing they've said or done. I don't watch Beck or listen to his radio show because I'm not the least bit interested in what he has to say, but it's almost as if O'Donnell is daring me to tune in. I've watched Bill O'Reilly on occasion and I've never heard him give his competition free publicity.

Whoever thought of this strategy over at MSNBC should be fired or Fox should hire them because they're doing an excellent PR job for Fox.

[JackintheGreen]

7. But I see this is what needs to be done

They need to be called out EVERY TIME THEY LIE. But what needs to happen (that isn't happening) is that they must be called what they are: LIES. And then, like in Canada (help me out with details here, Canadians!), they need to be penalized. Lie all you want. That's the first amendment. Just don't call it news.

[OHdem10]

9. ODonnell is giving the other side and showing how Beck etc are

wrong.

Up until now Fox went unchallenged. The Public had
to assume what they were preaching was gospel.

[madmax]

11. Cenk on CNN is doing the same

exposing Lumpnuts, showing video clips of him laughing while commenting stupidity on the disaster in Japan. Expose them, surely Americans aren't that stupid, are we? :crazy:

[Thomas Veil]

14. Public interest?

It infuriates me that Fox (or Limbaugh, for that matter) is allowed to operate openly as a propaganda arm of the Republican party. I was a Communications major in the 1970s, and if there was one takeaway message from those classes is that the FCC is charged with ensuring that the radio and TV spectrums in this country are used IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST. How on earth are these guys "in the public interest"? If they're allowed to operate at all, it should be with a constant disclaimer at the bottom, "The statements being made on this network may be true, distortions, or lies. View with extreme caution."