Fox Not Discussing War - War takes up less time on Fox News

[EV_Ares]

By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer

NEW YORK - On a winter day when bomb blasts at an Iraqi university killed dozens and the United Nations estimated that 34,000 civilians in Iraq had died in 2006, MSNBC spent nearly nine minutes on the stories during the 1 p.m. hour. A CNN correspondent in Iraq did a three-minute report about the bombings. Neither story merited a mention on Fox News Channel that hour.

That wasn't unusual. Fox spent half as much time covering the Iraq war than MSNBC during the first three months of the year, and considerably less than CNN, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The difference was more stark during daytime news hours than in prime-time opinion shows. The Iraq war occupied 20 percent of CNN's daytime news hole and 18 percent of MSNBC's. On Fox, the war was talked about only 6 percent of the time.

The independent think tank's report freshens a debate over whether ideology drives news agendas, and it comes at a delicate time for Fox. Top Democratic presidential candidates have refused to appear at debates sponsored by Fox. Liberals find attacking Fox is a way to fire up their base. "It illustrates the danger of cheerleading for one particular point or another because they were obviously cheerleaders for the war," said Jon Klein, CNN U.S. president. "When the war went badly they had to dial back coverage because it didn't fit their preconceived story lines."

Fox wouldn't respond to repeated requests to make an executive available to talk about its war coverage.

Another story that has reflected poorly on the Bush administration, the controversy over U.S. attorney firings, also received more attention on MSNBC (8 percent of the newshole) and CNN (4 percent) than on Fox (2 percent), the Project for Excellence in Journalism found. Fox's business interests may depend on less negative news about Iraq.

They're a news network, said CNN's Klein, "so it is surprising that they're not covering the biggest story in the country and the world." So with less on-air attention being paid to Iraq during the first few months of the year, what filled the void for Fox? PEJ's report said the network gave the death of Anna Nicole Smith significantly more air time than its rivals.

(Entire article @ link)


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070611/ap_en_ot/ap_on_tv_fox_s_war_3;_ylt=AvJ2M43WQD_xxwYjfLHZ8t4E1vAI

[Rydz777]

1. But what's happening to Paris? Foxy minds want to know. eom

[xultar]

2. Why does Faux hate Amerika? They can't report the good news? The schools, the flowers and candy?

The unpatriotic fucks @ faux.

[dennis4868]

3. "a debate over whether ideology drives news agendas?"

This has to be debated?

Because I live outside the USA, the only American "news" channel I get is FOX News and I never see them cover the war. It is 95% of the time on missing white people and bashing Sandy Burger for crumbling up national security documents in his pants. That's about all I get on TV. Thank goodness for the Internet!

[DeeDeeNY]

4. They are NOT a news network

Just putting "news" in the name of their network doesn't mean they actually do news. They do rightwing propaganda and whatever meaningless celebrity gossip they need to do to distract people from real news.

[Supersedeas]

5. Reporting so you can decide...no, not so much/ Deciding what to report -- yeah, they do

[tabasco]

6. That's why they have all those wavy flag thingies on their channel.

Those wavy flag thingies take the place of showing that nasty war.

Fox is soooo patriotic - they don't want to upset Americans with that nasty war stuff. So they put those wavy flag thingies on there to make everybody feel all good inside and proud to be an Amurkin.