You live in UK and are probably familiar with The Guardian. That newspaper is at least as far to the left, probably even more so than the Fox News Channel is to the right, and still people seem to view The Guardian as a serious newspaper.

Yeah I read it everyday . While I broadly agree with you, I think that the Guardian is a fair bit more balanced than Fox. Also if the Guardian had an editorial every other page telling you how fair and balanced it was, then I agree you would take it even less seriously.

Biggest difference I see between Guardian and Fox News (besides one being a newspaper and other being cable-tv, and one being biased for the left and other being biased for the right) is the language and how they present their news/opinions.

Guardian have a more sophisticated apporach, they dont present themselves as populistic as Fox News, and they lack the commentators who will whack you over your head and tell you how the other side is awful for this and that, and that they are enemies of Britain. But even though their apporach is classier and not so "dumbed-down" as that of Fox News its basically same [censored]; different wrapping.

But we are accustomed to liberal media, and we are accustomed to the method The Guardian uses to present their news and commentary, so we dont react to it. Fox News on the other hand is one of few major media outlets that are clealry right-wing, and they arent ashamed of being simple about things or behave like loud morons at times. Underneath it all I dont find The Guardian to be any better than Fox News, its just that The Guardian are less obvious about it.

Whether The Guardian has a "fair and balanced"-slogan or not does not change much.

See, you just don't get it. The reason that all these channels suck isn't because they are "too liberal" or "too conservative", it's because it is in their interest to paint every solution and every person as either "conservative" or "liberal", to the exclusion of talking about actual problems or actual solutions.

Fox is by far the best about drawing the line, about dividing people into one convenient box or the other. Worse yet, they convince people to support the box they were put into not because it's right or because it makes sense, but because the people in the other box are out to get you, and if you don't yell louder than they do, that just might succeed.

CNN/MSNBC are no where near as biased towards the left as Fox News is biased to the right.

i was just about to post this.

Barron

I think this depends on where you consider the middle to be. Lots of people think their news sources are unbiased because they agree with their sources.

\thread

I don't think anybody who's thinking critically about it thinks that their cable "news" source is "unbiased". The general dislike of Fox News for me is more about their brand of bias. At a high level, CNN seems to be "left" because they feature and highlight more stories with a natural liberal lean. Fox seems to be "right" because they take all stories (liberal, conservative, a-political) and twist them until they have a conservative lean. One is selection bias and the other is manipulation.

Dont all political news stories have both a "right side" and a "left side" to them?

Are you serious? So your position is that it is impossible for one side to actually, objectively be worse because its always just the fault of the viewer who has misplaced "center." Wow is that some lazy thinking. The poster you quoted suggested something that could POSSIBLY be true but gave no support for it, and you respond "/thread." Fantastic.

EDIT: Its even worse, you are saying there is no such thing as truth. Because if there IS such a thing as truth, then how "biased" you are is just an average of how far from the truth you consistently report. Certainly nothing like what the previous poster said. Just because we, individually, might not accurately place the "center" or truth of an issue doesnt mean it doesnt exist or that some networks arent worse than others.

Fact: 12.6% of people in the US live in poverty.

This doesn't need commentary or spin to be a liberal leaning story. CNN could run with that fact straight up and it will have the effect of making many people want to help poor people with social programs. Which would get them labeled a "liberal news outlet". Fox could then run the headline of "Bush Considers Introducing Poverty Relief Bill" and that could be true but it took them a little more effort to twist it into a conservative slant.

That's a simple fictional illistration of what I meant by selection bias vs manipulation.