I don’t get out much. What people are saying is that half of the country is consuming a false narrative, but I never hear any specifics. I don’t listen to much news broadcasts, and CNN doesn’t seem veridical to me at all. Is FOX like that, except on the other side?
Comments
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
I don’t get out much. What people are saying is that half of the country is consuming a false narrative, but I never hear any specifics. I don’t listen to much news broadcasts, and CNN doesn’t seem veridical to me at all. Is FOX like that, except on the other side?
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
Fox’s bias is twofold. Their opinion programs are wildly one sided, and their news programs paint a narrative by choosing what stories to report and what stories to skip.
An individual story will generally be accurately reported. The narrative the story contributes to by reporting similar stories and avoiding stories which counter the narrative, may not be accurate.
A lot of it is vapid opinion so they have nothing to defend. However two big ones come to mind:
2020 election lies, for which they settled
Uranium One, which Shep debunked other Fox hosts
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-believe-the-facts-tucker-carlson-tells-you-so-say-fox-s-lawye
Tucker Carlson straight up lied about Dominion voting machines. When they got sued, their defense was that no reasonable person would take Tucker’s claims as truth.
I saw a clip where the nearly all of the Fox Five didn’t know bison weren’t carnivores.
> What people are saying is that half of the country is consuming a false narrative, but I never hear any specifics.
Really? When people say this to you are they not saying because currently Fox News is pushing a lie or a false narrative and that is the thing the person saying is giving out about?
> CNN doesn’t seem veridical to me at all
How would you know?
> Is FOX like that, except on the other side?
No. Firstly Fox and CNN are both on the same “side”, its just a matter of degrees.
Secondly while CNN certainly has its problems in terms of money and corporate interests shaping narrative and what they choose to report, Fox News doesn’t even pretend to be anything other than conservative propaganda channel. As others have pointed out Fox News has repeatably argued in court they are not a news channel but rather an opinion and entertainment channel.
Fox News wasn’t ordered to pay $787 million in damages because they were truthful. That’s for damn sure.
I don’t watch fox news, so it’s hard to think of a bunch off the top of my head (aside from the Dominion lawsuit of course).
However, one example I saw a while back that really surprised me was a clip shown by a content creator I was watching. They played the fox news clip, which was reporting on a snippet of an interview with Tim Walz. Basically, fox was reporting that Tim Walz was advocating for buying ladders to help immigrants climb the border wall. In reality, Walz was criticizing the effectiveness of the wall and suggesting better alternatives. I can’t find the exact clip now, but I found an article that details the false version of the statement being circulated.
There’s also some interesting stuff on this wiki page.
Imo, though, there’s a larger issue with fox news than lies. If you’re genuinely curious, I highly recommend the documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad. It was released in 2015 (so pre-trump v1). I also recommend reading the comments under the video. It may not change your mind, but it might offer a little perspective of the bigger picture.
The supreme court rulet 9:0 against Trump.
Fox news when someone says they ruled 9:0 in favor of Trump? Crickets. No correction, nothing.
A migrant caravan is always headed to the US in the months leading up to an election, then never heard from again.
You might look for The Myth of theLiberal Media (https://youtu.be/q1I2Y5Ja9A0?si=6dT_3nPOXlCNrZj5) if you have not watched it already.
They do report things that are blatantly untrue, but another really big issue is they don’t report on a lot of things that happen. I often watch the news with fox, bbc, cnn, and msnbc all up at once and I can see all the stories they’re reporting on. With Trump they don’t report much or sometimes at all on the negative things that are happening. For example with this whole tariff thing the 3 other networks were reporting on it extensively when he first announced and as the story developed throughout the weeks and Fox consistently was reporting on transgender topics, rehashing Biden, and illegal immigrant stories instead. I notice this happens all the time. Fox just wont report on anything that could paint Trump in a negative light. The same thing happened through the election cycle. They would just completely ignore negative and strange things Trump said and did.
It’s all about the he said she said bullshit.
Their common approach is to quote lies to skirt around accountability for factual reporting. Fox News coordinates the GOP platform messaging with GOP politicians. Fox News is liable for stating factually untrue things. However, politicians can lie freely without legal consequence and Republican voters do not hold them accountable for it. So for every story, Fox News reporters ask GOP politicians their take and they quote those lies to spin the narrative. Technically Fox News has not said anything untrue because every untruth in their article was a quote attributable to someone else. The end result though is a Fox News reader will know less about any given topic than someone who doesn’t read the news at all.
This approach to lying combined with biased headlines and curating stories leads to them portraying a warped reality to their viewership.
CNN has fallen a bit from being a liberal outlet. MSNBC is the closest, but it is still silencing Pro-Palestinian voices. They recently fired most of their minority news anchors who were critical of Israel over the War in Gaza.
To me the issue with Fox News has always been less about literal lies, and more about how they push misleading, false, or pointless narratives.
I actually used to watch fox a fair amount for opinion shows back between the later GW and some of the Obama years. While I generally disagree with what they preach, I think it’s important to consume media from multiple points of view to get a more complete picture of public sentiment on an issue.
One early indicator for me was Bill O Reilly constantly spending time talking about the “War on Christmas”. It was a total non issue. Some companies or people were saying “happy holidays” vs “merry Christmas” because there are literally multiple holidays and they wanted to say something that was nice for people who don’t celebrate, and Fox turned it into this massive culture war battle. It was so profoundly stupid.
No, it’s not like CNN or MSNBC. Both of which I dislike strongly. CNN is centrist but biased towards lazy confrontations between their taking head from the left and right. MSNBC is mostly the same but has a few liberal evening programs. They might suck but they still have actual journalism standards and don’t knowingly lie or work for a party or movement.
Fox News is top to bottom a tool for the right. It was founded with the intention of never letting what happened to Richard Nixon happen to another republican. They wanted an outlet that would push propaganda and help them push the country to the right. They wanted to make sure that if a republican committed a crime they would fees no consequences.
Others have linked to it but the Dominion Case is far worse than people in this thread are saying.
The entire network from the on air talent to the management knew flat out that everything Trump and his team was saying about the elections were lies and intentional lies. They didn’t want to go that far but then started losing viewers to OAN and NewsMax and then … intensionally lied.
It more than that. They cover stories that benefit republicans and don’t cover ones that hurt them. They spin and twist to the point of complete dishonestly. They coordinate talking points and act as state media.
Watching Fox, really any right wing media that is successful, will make you far less knowledgable about the world than if you literally didn’t follow the news. It’s all misinformation and disinformation at this point.
(I should qualify this; Fox News Polling is generally considered to be top notch and there is a legitimate straight news operation operating inside the company.)
They made up a “war on Christmas.” When I was a child, the Christmas season was being held off by Thanksgiving. The day after, it’s a Christmas enema for a month, so lube up and bend over. Now, I’ve even seen Santa Claus getting mixed into Halloween decorations. Fox News, though, pretends that Christians and their holiday is under attack.
If you’re genuinely looking for specifics, just go over to mediamatters.org and start browsing. You’ll find many years of specific examples, with full quotes, video/audio, and context, from Fox and other right wing media.
If you’re genuinely looking for specifics, just go over to mediamatters.org and start browsing. You’ll find many years of specific examples, with full quotes, video/audio, and context, from Fox and other right wing media. Examples where they lie directly, where they don’t cover stories that are harmful to Republican narratives, where they spin/distort, etc.
Fox News intentionally lied about the 2020 election and it cost them almost a billion dollars.
Fox News lied about Russian control over Trump and helped create the current fascist regime.
Fox News has lied about Ukraine since at least 2013.
Fox News lies about mundane things like the US Constitution daily – all people in the US have rights and due process, for example – which Fox News denies.
Fox News lies about almost every story they present.
Fox News specifically doesn’t straightforwardly lie that much (although they fucked up badly with Dominion in 2020 and it cost them close to a billion dollars), the false narratives are more the result of selection bias and tonal bias that is absolutely obscene and that makes no pretense whatsoever at being anything other than straightforward propaganda for the GOP.
They know very well how to convey an idea they know is false without ever actually making the direct statement. Instead they couch it in repeated hypotheticals, i.e. “What if Hunter Biden had had sex with a hamster?” They’ll do a whole segment on that possibility without ever actually outright stating that Hunter Biden had sex with a hamster, but if you’re a viewer consuming that segment without a critical or interrogative mindset, you’ll walk away with that segment thinking “Holy shit, it’s possible Hunter Biden had sex with a hamster!” Repeat that 100x with 100 equally ludicrous stories and people, regardless of whether or not they believe any one specific story, start believing that where there’s smoke there’s fire, not understanding that they’re standing directly in front of a massive smoke machine.
Or they shield themselves from liability by having the lie spoken by a guest, who themselves can be shielded from defamation suits if they’re genuinely nuts and don’t know the statement is false, while the Fox News hosts, who know the statement is bullshit but want to promote it, simply fail to properly interrogate the idea and instead respond with leading questions (this got them into trouble in the Dominion suit, though, as their personal text messages revealed the strategy and opened them up to liability).
Then there’s the simple tonal bias of, the same actions are repeatedly conveyed in completely opposite ways depending on who commits them. Hunter Biden convicted of tax fraud? He’s a nefarious master criminal. Donald Trump convicted of 34 counts of financial fraud? Ludicrous overreach by the prosecutors.
Here’s a list from Politifact.
It’s not comprehensive but has good examples.
Others have given you good answers to your title question, I just want to answer your question in your description. No Fox is not like CNN but on the other side.
Fox News anchors regularly speak at Trump rallies, speak at CPAC, and openly campaign for conservatives. MSNBC anchors do this too, but for the left. If any anchor on CNN did any of that they would be fired immediately. CNN anchor Chris Cuomo was fired for merely speaking in private to his brother former Governor Andrew Cuomo during his scandal. He never spoke at a rally or endorsed his brother, just talked to him and CNN determined that was biased and fired him.
Google the lost lawsuit of dominion voting for starters.
Repubs dont trust judicial system so no answer will satisfy here.
I did not vote for trump
Fox doesn’t really lie by blatantly sharing untrue information. They lie with omission and spin and what they choose to cover. They’ll choose what stories to cover, how to cover them, and how to structure headlines and analysis in such a way as to drive you to the conclusion of supporting the Right/GOP/President.
Here’s an example on the headline choice here, but it can manifest in many different ways.
To reference some other current events, at this very moment the 2 stories at the top of Fox News are the Administration suing a state over allowing transgender athletes, and the New York AG calling the administration “bullies”. The latter is an actual current event but framed in a way that is meant to help Trump through spin, while the former is an example of Fox pushing a manufactured controversy that was a big winner for Trump in the election.
CNN and MSNBC do also have bias but it manifests differently since the goal is different. FOX is there to get you to support the GOP. CNN and MSNBC are there to farm engagement with outrage bait and to attempt to appear non-partisan through something like nitpicking minor things Joe Biden did.
They lost close to $800 million for lies about “rigged voting machines” and a plethora of other lies related to the 2020 election including things like vilifying Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss for handing off a mint while counting ballots. Currently they’re calling Kilmar Abrego Garcia an illegal gang member terrorist despite the fact that he was here legally and there’s zero evidence of any gang membership or even any crimes. They disproportionately host anti-vax opinions. They’re saying anti-Trump protesters are all paid by Soros (they should let me know where to get my check).
Tucker Carlson lied nightly to the point where his lawyers said in court that no reasonable person would believe him. For example, he said wild fear mongering BS like suggesting that BLM was buying people flights to go to California suburbs and literally walking up to houses and forcing people to leave so they could steal their homes.
The biggest problem is the North Korean level pro-Trump spin they put on e v e r y t h i n g. For example, when the market crashed in 2020, they wouldn’t cover it, but they were saying how brilliant and amazing he was for “lowering gas prices” when the real reason was that no one was driving during lockdowns and demanding was low. They spun Biden’s economy as horrible when we were the best in the world. They call Trump so manly for invoking deeply unpopular tariffs. They defended Nazi salutes, the Tate bros, Nick Fuentes, etc. They’ve pushed lies about Ilhan Omar marrying her brother and telling Somalians they would take over the US, going off a horrible mistranslation where she told Somali American citizens they have a voice in democracy. They won’t report in good faith on Israel. They’ve said Zalynsky started the war. They said Canadians want to be part of America.
They basically lie constantly.
The entire basis for the Republican platform these days is built upon lies, or misrepresentations. Fox news has reported on everything said by the right without any real effort at fact checking, so while they report that so and so said y. And that is objectively true, that so and so did say Y. Y as a fact on its own can be a lie, without Fox news nessisarily lying about anything legally. But its still deceptive, and representative of the truth.
Lets start with the lies, and such of RFK. There is not a pandemic of autism.
Vaccines did not cause an increase in the rate of autism among children in the USA.
There are not really any “unsafe” vaccines. saying so is a gross misrepresentation of a complicated subject.
Fluoride in the drinking water is not harmful.
Some other lies.
There is not an invasion at the southern boarder.
There is not a tidal wave of fentanyl coming in from Canada
Any time they call DEI programs racist, and harmful is a lie. And they are the ones being racist, bigoted, and gross.
Just about everything they say about gender identity is gross, and wrong. Facts are made up, the whole process of gender confirming care is misrepresented. Singular stories are cherry picked to prove a point that wider data completely disproves. Serious study into treatment methods is a fairly young in its scientific journey. The twisting of words sometimes is dizzying.
One thing to remember is that all of these news programs have motives that are not readily apparent. Everything on either side may need to be taken with some amount of salt. But God dam the world Fox news displays requires a whole new 4th wall.
Just look at how they reported upon the tariffs. Look at The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. And the effect it had on our country. Every single economist knew those tariffs would have a negative effect on our economy.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/what-know-about-president-trumps-liberation-day-tariffs
Not a single mention I saw of the dire warnings every economists gave. And this is there what you need to know. Apparently Fox viewers don’t need to know that tariffs like this deepened the great depression. I could go on and on. Every day there is a new lie, or misrepresentation.
Everyone else is giving you fine examples, but I think It needs to be said that one can be biased and shitty without saying things that are BLATANTLY untrue. Half truths are powerful. Omissions are powerful.
Still…
Every group has its wackos, but these aren’t 4% fringe numbers. Republicans absolutely have a problem with objective truth. All of the above are pure ass BS, and THAT many Republicans didn’t get those pure as BS opinions by themselves. They were fed that.
Was that Fox? Was that “Gramma’s Facebook”? Was that OANN? Was it “Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:My cousin’s Friend’s Brother said” emails? Was it Alex Jones type assholes on AM radio and Andrew Tate type assholes on youtube? It’s probably all of the above…
We absolutely have some crystal gazing hippies that think Vaccines cause Autism. We do. But that’s 4% fringe wacko numbers, not half of us. And we sure as shit don’t put them in charge of Health And Human Services!!!!
We’re not responsible for Measles and Whooping Cough coming back in the USA because Republicans don’t believe in basic science.
Y’all have a BIG problem with basic facts.
(Props for using “Veridical”, but it’s weird that you don’t think CNN is truthful.)
I would say it’s more about bad faith framing using appeals to emotion. Many of the stories seem tailored to appeal to Christian morality, stereotypes about immigrants, the depravity of non conservatives, and how Trump is perfect. Lately they have added, financial suffering for the greater good in response to the tariffs. 6 months ago $5 eggs was too much under Biden. Now we are facing tariffs in most items coming to America, some set to double and republicans just shrug.
Pretty much all U.S. news media are biased. The accusations against Fox of not telling the whole story is also very true with some NPR reports. Several years ago I made a point of listening to stories that I was well versed in that NPR “reported” on and it was very much an issue of only telling the story to fit the desired narrative.
The Economist magazine typically is neutral. I sometimes read Reuters articles. Most often I find The Times of India to have good information. Surprisingly, Dawn.com, which is from Pakistan can have good international news outside of issues dealing with Islam, where there is an expected bias.
With any news sources, you have to be aware of “loaded” words, meant to strike an emotional cord. If you’re interested in a topic reported on from a U.S. “news” source, read a couple articles from the alternatives I listed and you find the truth about the topic.
No. Fox news is pretty much a propaganda platform that creates right wing political power first, money second, and news maybe third. While CNN is a corporate media outlet which makes money first and news second.
I strongly recommend the slow burn coverage of fox news to get a handle on what the media industry thinks of fox news. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rise-of-fox-news-1-we-report-you-can-suck-it/id1315040130?i=1000669831719&l=pt-BR
https://www.reddit.com/r/FoxBrain/ is a good sub for what left wing people think of fox news.
Most liberals who are old enough have come to understand fox news from all the Jon Stewart original daily show episodes from 2005 to 2015. https://www.reddit.com/r/DailyShowTorrent/comments/e1yrl1/the_eagle_has_landed_the_thunderbirds_are_go_5_4/
The most common Fox news lie is an editorial choice I call the Fox news quote, knowing that most people only read snippets of headlines:
“Untrue or Inflammatory Statement”, person who said it
Here are some examples of headlines that do this from just the last couple days:
They do this all the time to push misinformation.
No it’s not like CNN. CNN has 10 times the credibility of Fox News, and I don’t think CNN is the shining beacon of great journalism either.
Fox News plays clips of Trump lying and then will use various tactics to not only make it seem like he’s not lying, but how it actually makes sense. They obfuscate the truth to make you think there is credibility behind lies told by Trump, when the truth is Trump is almost always wrong/lying.
Fox News, if you take the whole big lie 2020 story aside as its own thing, have a long history of taking opinions and presenting them as fact to their audience AND THEN refusing to acknowledge they made an error in reporting to correct the record. It got super bad in the Obama years and has only enhanced from there
They were saying tariffs were a sign of masculinity.
Their biggest problem is they omit anything bad Trump does and praise him for everything even if he had nothing to do with it.
They obviously push stories that hurt democrats and are misleading. The border comes to mind. When they say the border is wide open that is misleading. We have border patrol that takes people into custody everyday. The issue is Congress will not fix immigration. Republicans haven’t attempted to fix it and sabotage attempts by democrats because it isn’t “good enough”
Well for example I’m sure it’s showcasing Stephen miller saying the Supreme Court sided with trump 9-0 when it’s the opposite. I think they essentially showcase the lies coming from the admin.
Basically everything regarding tariffs. Tariffs are meant to be sales taxes and they’re doomed to fail in rejuvenating American manufacturing. The amount of gaslighting from Fox is shocking
I think the deception of Fox is less blatantly lying (not that they don’t on occasion) but that they distort people’s perceptions of the world by hyper focusing on things that should/could be ignored, and ignoring things that should be focused on.
I don’t really watch it but I’ve seen them have some wild claims about illegal immigrants.
What about the eating dogs and cats thing?
Here I’ll give you a really really good specific example and you’ll completely understand what we mean if we walk through it together:
Did Trump recruit dozens of RNC members and stock them with forgeries of electoral ballot to sneak into state capitol buildings, sometimes sleeping overnight, in order to pretend to be electors sent by the state lawfully rather than a candidate in an effort to defraud congress of a democratic election?
A few years ago there was a segment on fox News that devolved into the host staring wild-eyed into the camera and shouting “THE DEMOCRATS ARE DEMON RATS, THEY’RE DEMON RATS!!!!” You can Google it, I think her name is Jenny Piro or something like that.
So that’s the blatant falsehood I would go with: I’m a Democrat, many of my friends are democrats, and none of us are demonic rodents.
That Musk is finding MASSIVE levels of fraud in our welfare system.
If that were true, Fox would be filming hourly perp walks.
That they want merit-based hiring.
They just want to go back to the system of well-connected “It’s not what you know it’s who you know” hires.
Outright lying is definitely a huge part of it, like people have said, with the Dominion voting case a good example. But misleading narratives that just don’t cover certain subjects or leave out key facts can be just as bad.
For example, there was a lot of coverage during Biden’s term of the depletion of the US strategic petroleum reserve, and how this was dangerous because if there is a crisis, we have less of our own oil. That sounds bad! But what was not covered was that Biden depleted the reserve to stabilize western oil prices after Russia invaded Ukraine, to help ensure our allies weren’t hobbled by Russia curtailing their exports because of western opposition to the invasion. We sold the oil for a geopolitically important reason and started to refill our reserves. It showed smart global leadership and alliance building. But you didn’t get those details on Fox because its a propaganda network. Same goes for Trump’s recent games with tariffs, Fox just removed their stock market ticker. Propaganda by omission.
CNN is bad for other reasons. They just report driven by political conflict or violence (politicians are arguing about something, and if it bleeds jt leads). So you get the same 3-5 stories that fit this frame over and over again without a depth of analysis or even a rundown of what’s happening in the world outside of these things.
If I’m ever asked where people should get their news, I suggest a variety of print sources, not TV. The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal will give you a diversity of views but will include actual context, sourcing and fact checking.
It’s also important to note what they decide to focus on when the actual news doesn’t serve their purpose. The more stories about Joe or Hunter Biden, the more awful the current administration’s actions/repercussions are.
Here’s that $800 million settlement for lying about the election
LOLOL!
wow
I’m going to go out on a limb and say I am in the top 1% of Fox News viewers here. I watch all three cable news stations as often as I can.
> a false narrative
A false narrative usually isn’t blatantly untrue. Fox does occasionally delve into the realm of total, pants-on-fire lies, but that’s rare.
They shape a false narrative. They tell people things that are true, but not quite accurate and present them through a lens of triggers, grievances, and anger to get people thinking and saying things that are very distorted.
For example, today’s version of this is “the Democrats’ new heroes are terrorists and criminals,” casting people like Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Karmelo Anthony as “Democratic heroes” since apparently liberals are the only ones who are concerned about these people having access to due process and legal representation.
So they take something that is kind of true: liberals are understandably upset about any person, including someone with a complicated immigration status, being whisked off the streets and disappeared into a brutal foreign prison with no due process. But instead of focusing on the reasons people are concerned, they frame the story as “liberals hate you so much. They want to keep dangerous terrorists in the country so much that they’re fighting to have them brought back.”
This gives them a convenient story about how liberals suck, while the other networks are running stories about the president’s abuse of power and the dangers of these kinds of extrajudicial actions.
Every story, big or small, has an angle to push an opinion. If they talk about sports, they’re going to talk about how trans people are ruining them. If they show a police chase, it’s definitely going to be a violent minority fighting back. If they show a liberal politician, they will be saying something extremely woke.
Dominion Voting Systems being being faulty is Exhibit A
Lies aside..they use emotional diatribe regardless of the topic. Very us against them. If youte truly interested, try googling something like “Fox News” site:.edu
They just let Pam Bondi go on air telling blatant lies about Abrego Garcia
@katmabu.bsky.social has spent a young career watching FOX and analyzing the bullshit.
Then there’s this