Fox News controversies

Fox News is an American basic cable and satellite television channel owned by Fox Corporation. During its time on the air, it has been the subject of several controversies and allegations.

Fox News has been described by academics, media figures, political figures, and watchdog groups as being biased in favor of the Republican Party in its news coverage, as perpetuating conservative bias, and as misleading their audience in relation to science, notably climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Allegations of bias

Political figures

Former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean has referred to Fox News as a "right-wing propaganda machine", and several Democratic politicians have boycotted events hosted or sponsored by the network.Fox News Boss Hits Edwards' Boycott
CBS News, March 9, 2007Obama to Nix Fox Debate
ABC News's Political Radar, April 9, 2007 In 2007, several major Democratic presidential candidates (Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson) boycotted or dropped out of Fox News-sponsored or hosted debates.

Similar accusations were levied against Fox News in response to its decision to exclude Ron Paul and Duncan Hunter from the January 5, 2008, Republican primary debate. In response, many individuals and organizations petitioned Fox News to reconsider its decision. When Fox News refused to change its position and continued to exclude Paul and Hunter, the New Hampshire Republican Party officially announced it would withdraw as a Fox News partner in the forum.

While Fox News has been criticized for its tendency to support the Republican Party and its interests, David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, has also said, "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're discovering we work for Fox."

Media figures

CNN personality Larry King said in a January 17, 2007 interview with the ''Chicago Sun-Times'': "They're a Republican brand. They're an extension of the Republican Party with some exceptions, ikeGreta Van Susteren. But I don't begrudge them that. ox News CEORoger Ailes is an old friend. They've been nice to me. They've said some very nice things about me. Not illO'Reilly, but I don't watch him."

Writing for the ''Los Angeles Times'', Republican and conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg stated: "Look, I think liberals have reasonable gripes with Fox News. It does lean to the right, primarily in its opinion programming but also in its story selection (which is fine by me) and elsewhere. But it's worth remembering that Fox is less a bastion of ideological conservatism and more a populist, tabloid-like network."

Then-Fox News host Bill O'Reilly stated in 2004, in the context of the Iraq War, that "Fox does tilt right", but that the network does not "actively campaign or try to help Bush-Cheney."

Media watchdogs

Progressive media watchdog groups such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)The Most Biased Name in News – Fox News Channel's extraordinary right-wing tilt
FAIR, July/August 2001 and Media Matters for America,33 internal FOX editorial memos reviewed by MMFA reveal FOX News Channel's inner workings
, Media Matters, July 14, 2004 have argued that Fox News' reporting contains conservative editorializing within news stories. FAIR has asserted that the ratio of conservative to non-conservative guests on Fox News shows strongly favors conservatives. In a study of a nineteen-week period from January 2001 to May 2001 on ''Special Report with Brit Hume'', the ratio was 25:3, and FAIR obtained similar data from other Fox News shows.

The conservative watchdog group Accuracy in Media has claimed that there was a conflict of interest in Fox News' co-sponsorship of the May 15, 2007, Republican presidential debate, pointing out that candidate Rudy Giuliani's law firm had tackled copyright protection and legislation on the purchase of cable television lineups for News Corporation, the then-parent company of Fox News, Fox Sports, Foxtel, Fox Footy, Fox Sports News, Fox Television Studios, Fox Television Stations, Foxstar Productions, 20th Television, 20th Century Fox Television, 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment and DirecTV, and suggesting that Fox News might be biased in favor of Giuliani's candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination.

Response

Fox News has publicly denied such charges, stating that the reporters in the newsroom provide separate, neutral reporting, while acknowledging their opinion programming is not intended to be neutral.Interview transcript: Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes
the Financial Times, October 6, 2006

Ownership and management

Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch is the chairman of Fox Corporation, the News Corp subsidiary which owns Fox News. He has been a subject of controversy and criticism as a result of his extensive interests in print and broadcast media. In the United States, he is the publisher of the ''New York Post'' newspaper and the magazine ''The Weekly Standard''. Accusations against him include the "dumbing down" of news and introducing "mindless vulgarity" in place of genuine journalism, and having his own outlets produce news that serves his own political and financial agendas. According to the BBC News website: "To some, he is little less than the devil incarnate, to others, the most progressive mover-and-shaker in the media business."

Then-presidential candidate George W. Bush's cousin, John Prescott Ellis, was Fox News' projection team manager during the 2000 presidential election. After speaking numerous times on election night with his cousins George and Jeb, Ellis, at 2:16 AM, reversed Fox News' call for Florida as a state won by Al Gore. Critics allege this was a premature decision, given the impossibly razor-thin margin (officially 537 of 5.9 million votes), which created the "lasting impression that Bush 'won' the White House – and all the legal wrangling down in Florida is just a case of Democratic 'snippiness'." Others, such as researcher John Lott, have responded that, by this reasoning, Fox News and the other networks were even more premature in initially calling the state for ''Gore'', a call made while polls were still open, and which may have depressed voter turnout for Bush and actually affected the election, whereas the call for Bush later could not have, as the polls were closed by then.

On January 9, 2010, the son-in-law of Rupert Murdoch and the husband of Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth, Matthew Freud, stated he and other members of the media mogul's family are "ashamed and sickened" by the right-leaning tendencies of Fox News in the opening salvo in a bid to displace Roger Ailes, the founder, and CEO of Fox News. In a ''New York Times'' profile on Ailes, Freud was quoted saying "I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes' horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalist standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to. What you heard was a declaration of war. There are, practically speaking, now two factions inside of News Corp: Ailes and Fox News, and the Murdoch children – with Rupert caught between them." Although Murdoch did not respond to the remark directly, a spokesperson for News Corporation put a statement after a ''Financial Times'' inquiry claiming "Matthew Freud's opinions are his own and in no way reflect the views of Rupert Murdoch, who is proud of Roger Ailes and Fox News." Tim Arango also claims in Murdoch's 2008 biography that he voiced concerns privately to Ailes about his conduct, claiming he was purportedly "embarrassed" by Fox News. Murdoch denied that claim.

In June 2010, News Corporation donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association. News Corporation's political action committee had previously split their contributions to Democrats and Republicans by a margin of 54% to 46%, respectively.

On March 20, 2018, Fox News contributor Lt. Col. Ralph Peters left the network. Referencing the Trump Administration, Peters stated that Fox News had become a "propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration" and objected to the network helping "Putin's agenda by making light of Russian penetration of our elections and the Trump campaign". On March 22, 2019, '' Vox'' interviewed media critic Tom Rosenstiel, who argued Fox News had shifted from a partisan network to a propaganda network in support of President Donald Trump.

Reports, polls, surveys and studies

Polls and surveys

A poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports during September 2004 found that Fox News was seen as second to CBS as the most politically biased network in the public view. 37% of respondents thought CBS, in the wake of the Killian documents controversy, was trying to help elect Senator John Kerry, while 34% of respondents said they believed that Fox News' goal was to "help elect Bush". However, a poll by Public Policy Polling in January 2010 found Fox News to be the only U.S. television news network to receive a positive rating by the public for trustworthiness, with results strongly split depending on the political affiliation of the respondents. A survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed "a striking rise in the politicization of cable TV news audiences ... This pattern is most apparent with the fast-growing Fox News Channel." Another Pew survey of news consumption found that Fox News has not suffered a decline in credibility with its audience, with one in four (25%) saying they believe all or most of what they see on the network, virtually unchanged since Fox News was first tested in 2000.

According to the results of a 2006 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that Fox News was rarely cited by 547 surveyed journalists as an outlet taking an ideological stance in its coverage, and most identified as advocating conservative political positions. In the 2004 survey, 69% of national journalists cited Fox News as being especially conservative in its coverage of news.

A 2019 Pew survey found that Fox News is the fifth most trusted source in America for political and election news, with 43% of all polled voters (compared with 47% of second-place CNN and 34% of ninth-place MSNBC). However, it is also the least trusted with 40% of all polled voters (compared with 32% of second-place CNN and 26% of fourth-place MSNBC).

Studies and reports

The "2011 State of the News Media" Report by the Pew Center on Excellence in Journalism found that in 2010, Fox News had an average daytime audience of 1.2 million and nighttime viewership of 1.1 million, higher than its cable competitors but down 11% and 9% respectively from 2009. Fox News' cumulative audience (unique viewers who watched at least sixty minutes in an average month) was 41.1 million, coming in second to CNN with 41.7 million. For 2010, CNN's digital network continued to lead Fox News' digital network online; CNN with 35.7 million unique visitors per month, compared to Fox News' 15.5 million. For the first time Fox News outspent its competitors, with a total news investment of $686 million. 72% of this investment went to program costs, reflecting their focus on high-profile hosts. They also increased their revenues 17% over 2009 to $1.5 billion, well ahead of second-place CNN at $1.2 billion.

Content analysis studies

The Project on Excellence in Journalism report in 2006 showed that 68 percent of Fox News cable stories contained personal opinions, as compared to MSNBC at 27 percent and CNN at 4 percent. The "content analysis" portion of their 2005 report also concluded that "Fox was measurably more one-sided than the other networks, and Fox News Channel journalists were more opinionated on the air."

A 2006 University of California, Berkeley, study cited that there was a correlation between the presence of Fox News in cable markets and increases in Republican votes in those markets. A 2010 study found that with respect to coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2005, "Fox News was much more sympathetic to the ushadministration than NBC."

Studies of reporting bias

In a 2006 academic content analysis of election news, Rasmussen Reports showed that the 2004 election coverage from Fox News favored George W. Bush significantly more than John Kerry.Stephen Farnsworth and S. Robert Lichter, The Nightly News Nightmare: How Television Portrays Presidential Elections, Second Edition, Rowman & Littlefield, 2006 In a 2010 study of the news coverage of the 2004 political party conventions, Morris and Francia found that Fox News' reporting was more negative toward the Democratic convention and gave Republicans more opportunity to voice their message than the other networks. The study also found that viewers who relied on Fox News' coverage exhibited attitude change toward both candidates, but particularly a lowering opinion toward Kerry. In contrast the study found that CNN's coverage was more fair and balanced.

A study published in November 2005 by Tim Groseclose, a professor of political science at UCLA, scoring political bias from twenty mainstream news reporting outlets, concluded that all "except Fox News' Special Report and ''The Washington Times'', received scores to the left of the average member of Congress." In particular, ''Special Report with Brit Hume'' had an Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) rating that was right of the political center. Groseclose's model used the number of times a host cited a particular think tank on his or her program and compared it with the number of times a member of Congress cited a think tank, correlating that with the politician's ADA rating.

Geoff Nunberg, a professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley and a National Public Radio (NPR) commentator, criticized the methodology of Groseclose's study and labeled its conclusions invalid. He pointed to what he saw as Groseclose's reliance on interpretations of facts and data that were taken from sources that were not, in his view, credible. Groseclose and Professor Jeff Milyo rebutted, saying Nunberg "shows a gross misunderstanding four statistical method and the actual assumptions upon which it relies." Mark Liberman (a professor of computer science and the director of Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania), who helped post Groseclose and Milyo's rebuttal, later posted how the statistical methods used to calculate this bias pose faults. Liberman concluded "that many if not most of the complaints directed against G&M are motivated in part by ideological disagreement — just as much of the praise for their work is motivated by ideological agreement. It would be nice if there were a less politically fraught body of data on which such modeling exercises could be explored."

A December 2007 study by Samuel R. Lichter, of the self-described nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs, found that Fox News' evaluations of all of the 2008 Democratic presidential candidates combined was 51% positive and 49% negative, while the network's evaluations of the Republican presidential candidates 51% negative and 49% positive. The study, however, did find that Fox News' coverage was less negative toward Republican candidates than the coverage of broadcast networks.

A study by Media Matters for America found that between August 1 and October 1, 2013, on Fox News, "69 percent of guests and 75 percent of mentions cast doubt on climate science," compared to " alfof those quoted in ''The Wall Street Journal'' ... about 29 percent in the ''Los Angeles Times'', about 17 percent in ''The Washington Post'' and about 12 percent in Bloomberg News."Max Greenberg, Denise Robbins, and Shauna Theel,
Media Sowed Doubt In Coverage Of UN Climate Report
, October 10, 2013, Media Matters Fox News' argument against criticism that it disproportionately represents the views of climate change deniers was to itself deny the factual figures which indicate that 97% of climate science experts worldwide hold the consensus view of human-caused global warming. A 2012 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that, from February 2012 to July 2012, 93% of global warming coverage by Fox News was misleading. The report put the figure significantly lower—81 percent—for ''The Wall Street Journal''. The misleading statements identified in the report included "dismissals of human-caused climate change, disparaging comments about individual scientists, rejections of climate science as a body of knowledge, and cherry picking of data." A similar 2013 report, also conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists, found that 28% of global warming coverage by Fox News was accurate, a nine-fold increase from the aforementioned report but still significantly behind CNN and MSNBC respectively (70% and 92%).

Croft concluded that Fox News coverage glorified the Iraq War and its reporting framed the discussion in such a way as to drown out critics. He quotes Christiane Amanpour as stating that there was a culture of self-censorship created by "the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News".

A May 2017 study conducted by Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy examined coverage of President Trump's first 100 days in office by all major mainstream media outlets and broadcast networks including CNN, HLN, Fox News, MSNBC, NBC, ABC and CBS. It found that, altogether, Trump received 80% negative coverage from the media, and that he received the least negative coverage on Fox News – 52% negative and 48% positive.

Tests of knowledge of Fox News viewers

A study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs, as published in the Winter 03–04 issue of the ''Political Science Quarterly'', reported that poll-based findings indicated that viewers of Fox News Channel, the Fox broadcast network and local Fox affiliates, including in New York City and Los Angeles, were more likely than viewers of other news networks to hold three misperceptions:

* 67% of Fox News Channel viewers erroneously believed that the "U.S. has found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al Qaeda terrorist organization" (compared with 56% for CBS, 49% for NBC, 48% for CNN, 45% for ABC, 16% for NPR/PBS).
* The erroneous belief that "The U.S. has found Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq" was held by 33% of Fox News Channel viewers and only 23% of CBS viewers, 19% for ABC, 20% for NBC, 20% for CNN and 11% for NPR/PBS.
* 35% of Fox News Channel viewers erroneously believed that "the majority of people n the world favor the U.S. having gone to war" with Iraq (compared with 28% for CBS, 27% for ABC, 24% for CNN/HLN, 20% for NBC, 5% for NPR/PBS).

In response, conservative columnist Ann Coulter, a frequent guest on Fox News, characterized the PIPA findings as "misperceptions of pointless liberal factoids" and called it a "hoax poll". Bill O'Reilly called the study "absolute crap". Roger Ailes referred to the study as "an old push poll". James Taranto