Political News
Politics is the term given to a process by which a group of people make important collective decisions. Politics generally refers to decisions and actions by governments, but a politic can also describe actions within a corporation, academic organization, or a religious institution. A politic decision generally involves social relations with a large group of people by a smaller group of people who hold power. A politic is also an action that is formulated and enforced by those in authority through specific methods and/or tactics. The actual word “politics” originates from the Greek word politika, from politic, a word modeled from Aristotle’s book “affairs of state”.
In the United States, left wingers and right wingers are known as liberal and conservative, respectively. Liberals are generally regarded as supporting reform while conservatives are concerned about traditional views. This political spectrum has been the basis of American political structure for many years. Both sides do not see eye to eye, and with the emergence of political news channels came a lot of controversy. Fox News and MSNBC, two leading cable news networks have come under fire for offering unbalanced news, favoring one side over another. They have both been accused of reporting about political leaders on one side more favorably then the other, although they both largely deny these allegations. Fox News even has the catch phrase, “Fair and Balanced.”
Fox News:
Fox News is a political news channel that has been accused over the years of having a bias towards the political right side. The creator of the network, Rupert Murdoch, believes that the channel is giving room to both political views in an industry where only one side has had it before. In a recent research poll, Fox News is regarded as the political news channel that has the most ideological views, more than even MSNBC.
The organization, Media Matter for America, has made one of the largest claims on Fox News for its distortion of political news. After conducting extensive research, Media Matters concluded that Fox News has a political right agenda for reporting its news and uses several tools at its disposal. These tools are cropping quotes spoken by President Obama (a left-wing democrat), Vice President Biden, and Vice President Gore to give the quotes a different context; editing New York Times reporters out of aired images (the New York Times is regarded as a left-wing publication); and showing footage that does not properly coincide with the even they are claiming to report.
MSNBC:
Another political news channel accused of distorting news is MSNBC, which is accused of giving a left-wing distortion on political news. People have accused the network of gravitating to the left and the majority of its prime-time lineup has been taken by commentators favoring democratic coverage over republican coverage. Many people also accused the political channel of pro-Obama stances and given coverage to him over Hillary Clinton, as well as providing negative coverage about Presidential Candidate, John McCain. Even their slogan used during the 2008 presidential election was “The Power of Change”, a slogan very similar to Obama’s slogan during his campaign for president.
