Study Finds FOX News Most Balanced
A study released by the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University has found that FOX News has delivered the most well-balanced political campaign coverage of all major news outlets. This is not a typo or a joke story, you can find the full press release here.
The study found that FOX’s coverage was evenly split among both Democrats and Republicans with stories about Democrat candidates averaging 51% positive and 49% negative. Republicans got positive coverage 49% of the time and negative coverage 51% of the time. In contrast the major networks negatively covered Republicans 60% of the time while giving them positive coverage only 40% of the time.
Democrats enjoyed 47% positive network coverage and 53% negative coverage.
This post was written by AdamRBitely on December 27th, 2007.
Comments: 1
Comments
Comment from Chris
Time: January 3, 2008, 4:15 pm
Just to play devil’s advocate here, this actually doesn’t make FOX more balanced.
Working with these percentages alone assumes that Democrats and Republicans are just about even in how many negative/positive stories there are to tell about them. In other words, if (and I’m not saying that this is the case, I’m only saying “if”) Republicans were actually involved in negative press 60% of the time, and FOX only covered those scandals 51% of the time, this cannot be called balanced. In this case, it would have to be said that the Republicans were given preferential treatment because FOX had only reported 85% of the negative press there was to report about them.
Now, understand that my comment here is not attacking Republicans, not is it claiming that Republicans indeed have been involved in so many scandals (or even just negative press), I’m only attacking this statistic. It’s still entirely possible that other major news networks favor Democrats. But even if that’s the case, it’s important to present the numbers accurately.
Write a comment