Tag Results for Fox News

Newsweek called it "the Interrupt-a-thon." Fox New's Bret Baier sat down with President Barack Obama this week, but was it an interview or an argument? Fox lovers say Baier was just trying to pin Obama down to specifics, but haters say he was rude and just trying to insert the network's conservative talking points.

Today, at the BusinessWeek summit in New York, CNN President Jon Klein asserted that social networks trouble him far more than the likes of Fox News.

"The people you're friends with on on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information," he said. CNN, then, has to be impartial, "the pipeline for reliable, accurate information," according to Klein.

Perhaps that explains the advent of CNN's newest offering, "John King, USA," slated to air on March 22. King takes over for Lou Dobbs, replacing opinion journalism with down-the-line news. But is there any proof that this sort of programming is working for CNN?

To the contrary.

For years, Fox News Channel has clobbered CNN in the ratings, and the most recent numbers remind us of CNN's increasingly desperate situation.  While Fox snagged more prime time viewers last week than any cable channel except USA, CNN ranked thirty-first - behind HGTV, the SYFY channel, Bravo, and the Hallmark Channel. 

Meanwhile, perennial also-ran MSNBC is effectively crushing CNN in prime time as well. In the money demo (25-54), Chris Matthews defeats Wolf Blitzer, Keith Olbermann defeats Campbell Brown (sometimes by a margin of 3 to 1), and Rachel Maddow occasionally tops Larry King.

The bigger question, though, is where CNN is headed. Pulling Campbell Brown from NBC was a coup for CNN, but she's proven to be a ratings disaster. Larry King still seems barely sentient and will likely be exiting when his contract expires. 

Can CNN's ratings be revived? And how?

The media-watch vultures have begun to circle over MSNBC weeknights at 8 p.m., anticipating that the show widely considered to be the great liberal counterbalance to Fox News will soon be a bloated carcass.

Jeff Bercovici, the media guy for Aol Daily Finance, says Olberman's ratings in the 25-54 demographic have tanked over the last year, down 44 percent in January from the same period in 2009. That column earned Bercovici an Olbermann blast during his Worst Person in the World segment, in which Olbermann inexplicably called Daily Finance a "right wing site."

Olbermann also countered with some numbers of his own, insisting that his 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. "Countdown" broadcasts were both up in January over December and that his 8 p.m. show still owned a substantial lead over CNN and HLN. Olbermann didn't mention Fox's ratings, probably because the "The O'Reilly Factor" has more than three times his audience among 25-54 year olds.

But it's not all about the numbers. Several commentators have written lately that Olbermann's over-the-top histrionics are getting tiresome - the latest example being his thinly-supported rant about U.S. Senator-elect Scott Brown.

The rant - in which Olbermann branded Brown  "an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman and against politicians with whom he disagrees" - earned Olbermann the Jon Stewart treatment.

Adding insult to injury, Stewart will be bumping up the ratings of Olbermann's Fox rival for the next two nights, making a must-see-TV appearance on O'Reilly.

While covering the devastation in Haiti CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta appeared to be at a loss for words. Fox News reporter Steve Harrigan broke down. Has media fatigue set in on the reporters covering the Haiti earthquake?

When the worst earthquake in more than a century struck Haiti this week, plunging the poor country into chaos. The media faced a difficult challenge reporting from a country in ruins in delivering reports and making sense of information.

Fox News is wasting no time capitalizing on all the buzz about their signing of former GOP Veep candidate Sarah Palin as a regular commentator. She's making her debut tonight with Bill O'Reilly on "The O'Reilly Factor."

The shoot-from-the-hip former GOP veep candidate has landed on the shoot-from-the-hip news network. It's news so expected, it's almost unremarkable.

Fox News confirmed today that it has made room in its big tent for Sarah Palin. According to a story on the New York Times web site, Palin has inked a multi-year deal to appear regularly as a commentator but will not have her own show.

Yet.

Oh yea, and the Herald just endorsed Scott Brown.

Throughout this month, our friend Dan Kennedy has produced an interesting series of posts on his Media Nation blog around the topic "Why Climategate doesn't matter."

In his half-dozen posts on the subject, he cites a variety of environmental examples of warming, including: cross-Arctic ship travel, disappearing Alaskan permafrost, shrinking Antarctic ice, dying coral reefs, stressed maple trees, and, most recently, a species of penguin that appears headed toward extinction.

Good examples all, but I also think there's a larger point to be made about why - despite the exhortations of climate skeptics, warming deniers, Fox News anchors, and Wall Street Journal editorial writers - the media shouldn't get drawn into covering climate science as if it were simply a debate between opposing sides.

I'm not saying there isn't a scientific debate. In fact, let's assume for the moment that there is a legitimate two-sided argument rather than an emerging global scientific consensus that man-made emissions are warming the planet. The point is that it doesn't matter.

The fundamental issue surrounding climate change - and the one the media should be using to frame the discussion - is logic, not science.

Imagine you're the captain of a supertanker. The sonar and radar are on the fritz, but your lookout reports a dark mass in the water about a mile dead ahead. It could very well be a harmless algae bloom, your navigator says, but it could also be an uncharted reef. Since it takes a mile to turn the ship out of the way, do you: A) Wait until you've confirmed whether its algae or a reef before taking action? Or B) Turn the ship as a precaution, even though your new course may make the trip less convenient and more expensive?

The logical answer, of course, is B. But the climate deniers and the media outlets covering the issue as a he-said, she-said seem to have tuned out their inner Mr. Spock. I've seen a hundred purported reasons why man-made climate change may not be happening, but not a single offer of definitive proof that it actually isn't - which would be the only conceivable argument for non-action.

In other words, the media should be putting the burden of proof on the skeptics, who are asking the human race to stake its future on the fact that their side is right, not on a handful of scientists from an obscure university northwest of London.

Anything else would not only be disingenuous, but also a monumental failure of the media's mission to the public and the planet.

According to our friends at Fox News, most people aren't buying that whole global-climate-change-thing. But thanks to Glenn Beck, they sure are buying a lot of gold!

AOL Daily Finance's Jeff Bercovicci has the story about Beck ("Thar's gold in them shills!"), who is simultaneously a gold-pushing prophet of doom on Fox News and a pitchman for Goldline International, a major online seller of precious metals. Politico has also done some admirable work on the topic.

Meanwhile, fresh off the announcement of its new "zero tolerance" policy for broadcast errors, Jon Stewart has a new bit on Fox News fudging the facts to apparently push a political agenda, this time on climate change.

It seems Fox News posted the results of a new poll which found that 59 percent of Americans surveyed believe it "somewhat likely" that scientists have fudged climate change data to support global warming theories. Fox also said 35 percent called it "very likely," while 26 percent called it "not very likely."

59% + 35% + 26% = 120%

It seems the actual poll results were that 35 percent of those surveyed said "very likely" while another 24 percent called it "somewhat likely." Why that wasn't significant enough for Fox is anyone's guess, but they apparently added together the 35 percent and the 24 percent into a sort of "at-least-somewhat-likely" category. Then by double-counting the 35 percent "very likely" result, Fox News made it seem like 94 percent of people surveyed believe all those scientists who've devoted their professional lives to climate research are a bunch of charlatans.

And is that so far-fetched, really, after the release of those e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia? I mean, consider the source. When have Russian hackers ever misled us before?

Regardless of what he says about his new plan for Afghanistan, tonight's press conference could be seen as a sign that at least President Obama's get-tough-with-Fox strategy is working.

After refusing to carry Obama's July 22 press conference or his Sept. 9 primetime address to Congress live, Fox announced yesterday that it will air tonight's 8 p.m. presidential press conference on its main network. And that's not all - Shepard Smith, seen by many as the most fair and balanced of the "Fair & Balanced" crew at Fox News - will be anchoring the broadcast portion of the coverage.

Has Fox softened? Or is it just a case that the entertainment side won't take as big of a hit as it might have?

Obama's September address would have stepped on the season premiere of "So You Think You Can Dance," as well as the first new episode of the new hit show "Glee." Instead, Fox put the address on Fox News, with a crawl alerting Fox network viewers that Obama was speaking. Tonight, Fox says it will still air a two-hour "So You Think You Can Dance" special after the Obama press conference.

ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN have also announced they will carry the press conference live.