Analysis of Obamas Candidacy Coverage by Fox News - Essay Example

Renee Reynaga December 16, 2007 Analysis of Obama's candidacy coverage by Fox News Fox News is widely known for its right-winged, conservative slant that lacks media credibility. Fox was quick to repeat a story that Insight magazine published shortly after Barak Obama announced that he would run as a presidential candidate in the 2008 election. The story stated that: Barak Obama was raised as a radical Muslim and attended a Madrassa, a type of Islamic fundamentalist school that trains its students on how to make war on infidels. According to a government website titled: Barak Obama U.S. Senator for Illinois, Barak Obama's office issued a memo in which part of it read: "Insight Magazine published these allegations without a single named source, and without doing any independent reporting to confirm or deny the allegations. Fox News quickly parroted the charges" (Debunked Insight Magazine). After the rumor about Obama turned out to be false Fox News aired The Live Desk with Martha MacCallum in which MacCallum squarely places the blame of the rumor about Obama being a radical Muslim on the Clinton administration due to e-mails that were allegedly circulated on the internet by Clinton staffers. By placing the blame of the rumor on the Clinton administration Fox News smeared two democrats at once. Obama claimed that he was a Christian. Surely Fox News couldn't find fault with that, but they did. Fox News' Sean Hannity has alleged that the church Obama is a member of, United Church of Christ which is located in Chicago, is a racist church. On Hanninty's show on Fox News, Hannity made the accusation that Obama is a racist and he made implications to have the Reynaga, 2 viewer believe that if Obama is elected President the whole country will be ran in a way to promote only a black agenda. During the 2004 elections, Senator John Kerry faced similar slander as Fox ran a story that a Communist organization supported Kerry for president, thereby tying Kerry to Communism. The story turned out to be a bunch of kids that were pretty much just joking about being a part of a communist organization in support for Kerry. Fox reporters repeatedly made accusations that Kerry flip flopped over important issues such as the Iraq war resolution. At Fox News "fair and balanced reporting" is incapable of happening when the opinion commentators are given the credibility by Fox as reporters of the news. In the book titled, Fair and Balanced My Ass!, written by Joseph Minton Amann and Tom Breuer, they write "So what we're seeing more and more in today's news business particularly at Fox, is that personality and opinion sell. Not reasoned and informed opinion but blustering, loud, obnoxious, in-your-face opinion" (11). Fox creates ideologies against liberal democrats in order to support a conservative republican agenda. In the book titled, South Park Conservatives, author Brian C. Anderson writes: "Watch FOX for just a few hours and you encounter a conservative presence unlike anything on television before 1996" (51). Fox news is opinion laden with shows like the O'Reilly Factor, The Grapevine, and Fox and Friends. And the opinions are all against democrats. The host of Fox and Friends, Steve Doocy is now famous for his blunder of a statement against Obama "Why didn't anybody ever mention that that man right there was raised - spent the first decade of his life, raised by his Muslim father - as a Muslim and was educated in a Madrassa" The reason why Fox Reynaga 3 News can get away with its slanderous ideologies thrown vehemently into American homes on a nightly basis is because the pseudo reporters are opinion commentators. According to the Associated Press' Stylebook 2002 and Briefing on Media Law, "The rationale behind the opinion privilege is that only statements that can be proven true or false are capable of defamatory meaning and that statements of 'opinion' cannot, by their nature, be proven true or false" (344). The many opinion shows circulating on Fox News have become very influential in the terms of framing democratic candidates and misleading the American public. Fox also frames ideologies of democrats in the sly way it posts the pictures of democrats and republicans on its website foxnews.com. The pictures of most of the democratic candidates are posted as the candidates are in mid-sentence making it seem as though they are unfriendly inapproachable people, whereas most photos of the republican candidates depict them as smiling and not in a frozen mid-sentence frame in which their lips curve into a snarl for less than a second. Charlie Rose interviewed Bill Clinton just recently on PBS. In the interview Clinton tells Rose that he believes Obama is more of a symbol than substance and that he's not ready to be president. The Fox News website has made sure to have a clip of that show. Anytime one democrat speaks against another democrat Fox broadcasts it. Bias has crept into almost all major media outlets. In the book titled Media Myth Makers, author Benjamin Radford writes "Though the news media usually try to make sure their reporting is not obviously politically biased, there are other, less recognized biases that plague this powerful business, ranging from how journalists choose what news to emphasize to the subjects they interview" (14). When Fox News proposes "fair and Reynaga 4 balanced reporting" what they really mean is that they believe all the other TV stations like CNN, ABC, NBC, and PBS are tilted toward the left and their trying to tilt the scales toward the right. In Bias, by Bernard Goldberg, who started off as a CBS reporter, Goldberg writes "I said out loud what millions of TV news viewers know and have been complaining about for years: that too often, Dan and Peter, and Tom and a lot of their foot soldiers don't deliver the news straight, that they have a liberal bias, and that no matter how often the network stars deny it, it is true" (12). Reporters on Fox often let their emotion play into the stories they don't just report the story they become involved in the story. In South Park Conservatives Anderson supports the way Fox News reporters report on the war in Iraq, Anderson quotes David Asman as saying "For the free media to take sides against an enemy bent on eradicating the free society itself, he argues, isn't unfair or culturally biased; it is the only possible logical and moral stance" (54). The media has strayed from the days when reports were given in a professional detached way that allowed the viewer to truly decide for themselves which way to perceive the report that they just heard. Reality is only based upon perception and it would seem as if a bias in the media would work to shape viewers perceptions of the world to coincide with whatever idea or thought the media was trying to get the viewer to buy. In Media Myth Makers Radford writes on page 147: Many ethical reporters and journalists who would ordinarily be loathe to stray from their prized objectivity use tragedy as an excuse to throw in emotional reporting and loaded words that would be wholly unacceptable in any other type of news story [] Emotion in news media can bias reporting and manipulate audiences, but there is another reason it pops up so frequently. Emotion is easy, while getting the facts right takes work. Reynaga 5 The above quote could be the reason why Fox News was so eager to report the false stories that Obama is a Muslim terrorist or that Obama is a racist Christian. The facts they had were incorrect, but regardless and recklessly they still ran with it. Obama and the other democratic presidential candidates have been treated less than fairly by Fox News. Fox is quick to repeat an unsubstantiated story if it allows them a hidden opportunity to slander a democrat. The goal at Fox News is to promote republican candidates. As election time draws nearer we will probably see a relentless campaign against all democratic presidential candidates hosted by Fox. The ideologies that Fox creates promote a one-sided opinionated view that when it's broken down to its simplest terms states that: Conservative Republicans - good; Liberal Democrats - bad. Of course the argument can be made that bias exists throughout all major media outlets. The biases are hidden in subtle ways. Ultimately it seems as if it's up to the viewer to do the work and get the facts. The days when a reporter would come on the news and just report the facts are gone. As viewers we need to do research on the news that we here on a daily basis by checking the different TV stations to get the liberal view and the conservative view and then to form our own opinion. Reynaga 6 Works Cited Anderson, Brian. South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2005 Barrak Obama U.S. Senator for Illinois. Debunked Insight Magazine and Fox News Smear Campaign. 23 January 2007.. Fox News Website. 17 December 2007. . Goldberg, Bernard. Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2002 Goldstein, Norm, ed. Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law. New York: Associated Press, 2002 Radford, Benjamin. Media Myth Makers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2003 Read More