Fox News: the most trusted, most ideological network in America

Via Pulse

Sarah Palin, John McCain's former running mate during the 2009 US presidential election, is shown here displaying her trademark wink. Palin joined Fox News as a "political commentator" earlier this month.

On January 28th, right-wing Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly boasted that “Forty-nine percent of Americans, half the country, trust the Fox News Channel.” O’Reilly based his statements on a recent Public Policy Polling survey conducted by telephone:

That’s a rout. By a huge majority, Americans now believe the Fox News Channel is the most honest purveyor of information in the country.

The survey is also accompanied by the following statement:

Predictably there is a large party split on this with 74% of Republicans but only 30% of Democrats saying they trust the right leaning network.

Fox News, which insists that it provides “fair and balanced” coverage (one of its official taglines), has been criticized from all fronts for being deeply biased and right-wing leaning in its reporting. Accordingly, in October 2009 the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press (an independent, non-partisan public opinion research organization) released findings indicating that Fox News is also viewed as the most “ideological network” in the United States, a result which Fox News supporters embrace.
What can we derive from these two surveys, conducted within a few months of each other, if they are accurate? Here’s a start: if Fox News is the most trusted news network in the United States, then it is trusted because it reaffirms the opinions of its audience. Dean Debnam, the President of Public Policy Polling, concurs:

A generation ago you would have expected Americans to place their trust in the most neutral and unbiased conveyors of news…But the media landscape has really changed and now they’re turning more toward the outlets that tell them what they want to hear.

Ed Pilkington expands on this idea in the Guardian, where he includes that even members of the Murdoch family have admitted to Fox News’ bias:

Earlier this month the PR executive Matthew Freud, who is married to Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth, told the New York Times he was “ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of journalistic standards”.

Roger Ailes, a former media consultant for Richard Nixon, Ronald Regan, and George W. Bush, is the American president of the the Fox News Channel.

Earlier this month Al Jazeera’s Riz Khan based a show on the role of the media in the United States, and opened with statistical findings indicating that US foreign policy coverage by mainstream news outlets has been in decline over the years. Khan asked progressive media veteran Amy Goodman and journalism academic John Maxwell Hamilton why the majority of Americans don’t appear to be as interested in international news events as they are in local affairs, and discussed the extent to which “junk news” and tabloidism dominate news outlet output. Fox News was not a focal point throughout the show, but it would be interesting to know how the commentators would have categorized the cable and satellite news network, which is a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, a multi-billion dollar media and entertainment broadcasting empire.
Interestingly, Pilkington also notes that:

The poll findings are vindication of the commercial strategy of Fox News..Fox News threw out the old model of television news – pitched towards a mass audience across the political spectrum and aspiring to standards of fairness in reporting – and replaced it with an aggressive drive for a niche audience of rightwing voters.

This “aggressive drive” is heavily permeated with what many viewers (right-wing or not) consider “entertaining,” something which should also be considered when trying to derive the reasons for Fox News’s high viewer numbers.
Pinkington adds:

As further evidence of its pre-eminence, Glenn Beck, the network’s most strident and emotive of rightwing hosts, was this week voted second favourite TV personality in the annual Harris Poll, behind only Oprah Winfrey.

In case you are unsure about how much of Fox News is entertainment and how much of it is news, consider the following clips which in no way deviate from their normative standard. By the way, the “instant sadness” that Glenn Beck displays in the third clip (a behind-the-scenes look at a photo shoot he did for a magazine) is strikingly similar to the tear works that he displays on his ”news” show.