COM 317: Today in class ... let's dig up some facts

Let's do some of the research for your Nov. 30 papers today.

First, to help you get in the mood, here's comedian Jon Stewart's take on some Fox News commentary by Sean Hannity. Spoiler alert: Huffington Post's summary notes, "Jon Stewart and his team ... point[ed] out neither the color of the leaves nor sky in the tacked-on video matched that of the actual footage. They went on to mock Fox by adding more video to the interview, this time from Woodstock and the movie '300.'"

Swapping pix is purely unethical. Certainly it would be in a news report, and I think it is in an opinion piece as well ... not because of its political edge but because it makes one thing look like something it isn't.

But journalistic ethics is always fuzzy around the edges. Always. And Fox isn't the only TV network that futzes around with news and opinion. It's just the one Jon Stewart most enjoys poking fun at.

So let's try to be a little more, uh, fair and balanced.

In class today let's go out on the World Wide Web and see what we can find about political bias in Fox, MSNBC, CNN ... all the news- and commentary gang. When you find a good piece, post a link as a comment to this post. If you're comfortable with HTML tags, make it a working link. If you're not, just copy and past the URL in the address field of your browser to the comment.

Tangent: To refresh your memory, the HTML tag above would look like this: <a href="http://www.blogger.com/" target="_blank">Jon Stewart's take on some Fox News commentary</a> ... if you haven't had this yet in COMM 207, don't worry. We'll get to it soon.

This week's Time magazine has an essay by James Poniewozik that points out another kind of media bias - one I think all of our national media share. (Many thanks to Pete Davis for pointing it out to this Newsweek reader!) Poniewozik, a Time staff writer, points out a Pew Research Center report that suggests a centrist or middle-of-the-road bias in the "mainstream media." His headline tells it all: "Polarized News? The Media's Moderate Bias." He says:

... the news audience, if not news itself, is getting more polarized. But categories like Pew's "liberal," "conservative" and "neither" imply that our society is as simplistic about media bias as we are about politics (when in fact both involve nuanced positions), and they overlook the most significant bias out there: moderate bias.

As anyone following health reform knows, centrism is a political position too. And you see moderate bias — i.e., a preference for centrism — whenever a news outlet assumes that the truth must be "somewhere in the middle." You see it whenever an organization decides that "balance" requires equal weight for an opposing position, however specious: "Some, however, believe global warming is a myth." ...

Poniewozik adds:

Pretty plainly, Fox News is full of conservative opinion hosts, while its news wing has fixated on anti-Obama causes célèbres from ACORN to the tea-party protests. (Equally plainly, the White House is not concerned about fighting the bias of, say, MSNBC hosts who agree with it.) But Sean Hannity's Republicanism, Beck's populism and Mike Huckabee's Christian conservatism are very different — as are, say, [MSNBC program hosts] Rachel Maddow's progressivism and Chris Matthews' Democratic insiderdom. American politics has civil libertarians and Wall Street conservatives and social-justice moralist-populists and much more.

And they all, in these unsettled times, have various issues with the centrist establishment — which has its own permutations and camps. All of this promises wild and interesting times for journalists to cover, but they won't be able to do it from the neutral center. Because there isn't one, and there never was.

Which describes the world as I know it. And always knew it.