There have been numerous case studies that I have been trying to document in recent weeks and months, but for space limitations, I have narrowed down a brief look at Fox News' reporting to three instances. One of them has been hinted at in two preceding posts.
1) 'The War on Terror'
-Today, if you stroll on over to the Fox News website, and click over to their super-special section on the War on Terror, the first story on their nice little list is about...guess what! Iraq war protests. I'm not sure which is more absurd...categorizing domestic war protests into a section about a global war on terror, or the fact that Fox News is still attempting to forge a connection, however subliminally, between the War on Terror and the Iraq War. Actually, I do. The latter is far worse. How many more intelligence reports and fact finding missions do we need before we stop pretending that the invasion of Iraq had anything to do with the efforts in Afghanistan and elsewhere in securing our country from terrorism? This isn't a matter of bias...it's a matter of just being plain wrong.
2) A Grim Milestone
-Professor Keith's initial post touched on the theme of a drop-off in Iraq War coverage. One event that was an exception to this was the 4,000th American death, right around the fifth anniversary of our war efforts there; this event was well documented throughout the media. That is, unless you happened to click over to Fox News' website the day of the milestone as I did. Those pages have long disappeared, but I took some screen shots. See how you do at this little game of 'one of these things is not like the other.'
Screenshots from March 24th, 2008 (4,000th American fatality)
ABC News
CNN
Google News (content amalgamator)
MSNBC
Yahoo! News (content amalgamator)
and last, but not least:
Fox News
Notice a difference? For the record, the story never appeared on the front page of their site that day, or any other. The biggest story out of Iraq in months, depicting an undeniably grim situation in the already unpopular war, and the headline is conveniently tucked away, nowhere to be found. Instead we get a headline about the six month old mystery of the disappearance of an attractive white woman (hint to detectives: talk to the husband).
3) The rise of the second Soviet Union!
-Being the communist fearing American that I ought to be, I trembled in terror today when Fox News informed me on the front page that the Soviet Union was making a comeback. And why, might you ask? Apparently because a poor, unfortunate pastor from the United States was out doing his bestest Russian friend in the whole wide world a big favor, when those mean old Soviets arrested him and threw him in jail...or so the Fox headline would have you believe. Why else would you embed a completely non-related headline, to a completely separate story, within the text of the jailed-priest story? Truth be told, the story's a little different (here's proof). Turns out that pastor friend of our's was actually smuggling illegal ammunition into the country. Going back to the screenshot of the Fox News front page, this absurdity is only compounded by what they boast as the top story: those crazy, off-the-wall liberals are apparently at it again in London, parading around in Monkey suits to protest God-knows what. The juxtaposition between this, and Fox's reactionary stance on a (truth-be-told) fairly jailed individual in a one-time communist state raises some interesting questions.
Then again, we are talking about a network owned by the very same man who owns the publication responsible for this:
Is this the direction that we want our news outlets to be moving in as we increasingly become an international community, dependent on these types of sites as a source for information on the world around us? Or am I beating a dead horse?
-Scott Kelley
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