Resource📢 Is Fox a News Outlet?
🗽A well informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny.
Five Things We Can Do to Stop Propaganda:
Promote Media Literacy: Educate people on how to critically evaluate information, recognize bias, and identify reliable sources. This helps individuals resist manipulation and misinformation.
Support Fact-Checking Initiatives: Encourage and amplify the work of fact-checking organizations that verify claims made by media outlets, politicians, and public figures. Fact-checking helps counter false narratives with evidence-based information.
Advocate for Independent Journalism: Support and subscribe to independent, fact-based news organizations that prioritize truth and transparency over sensationalism or ideological bias. Quality journalism is key to maintaining an informed public.
Encourage Civil Discourse: Foster open, respectful discussions that prioritize facts and reason over emotions and division. Encouraging diverse viewpoints and critical thinking can reduce the impact of polarizing propaganda.
Hold Tech Platforms Accountable: Pressure social media and tech companies to combat the spread of misinformation by implementing stronger content moderation, fact-checking systems, and algorithmic transparency to reduce the reach of propaganda.
Here are the works cited and resources used in “Is Fox a News Outlet”
Fox News Has Always Been Propaganda
Fox News has always been propaganda, ever since it first went on the air in October 1996.
Fox has never been an honest news network, and the inability and/or unwillingness of so many to recognize this obvious fact is what has allowed it to poison our discourse for so long.
Republican candidates were routinely given contracts and free airtime to spout lies about immigrants, climate change, tax cuts, and so much else, and Fox's hosts rarely pushed back.
The purpose of Fox News, aside from the billions it brings in for Murdoch, is to push a right-wing agenda.
Fact check: Trump makes at least 19 false claims in one-hour Fox town hall with women
The Republican presidential nominee made at least 19 false claims in the one-hour event that aired Wednesday morning – most of them debunked earlier in the campaign but some of them new, notably including an absurd claim that he is "the father of IVF."
Fox News controversies
Fox News has been described by academics, media figures, political figures, and watchdog groups as being biased in favor of the Republican Party in its news coverage,[1][2][3][4] as perpetuating conservative bias,[5] and as misleading their audience in relation to science, notably climate change[6][7][8][9] and the COVID-19 pandemic.[10][11][12][13]
Fox News was sued for defamation in 2021 by two voting machine companies alleging the network's hosts and guests knowingly promoted falsehoods that voting machines were rigged to deny Donald Trump's reelection in the 2020 presidential election. The companies sought a total of $4.3 billion in damages. Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to resolve the defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems over the network's promotion of misinformation about the 2020 election.
Fox News is considered a generally unreliable source for its scientific and political coverage and its talk shows.
How Fox "News" Became the "Greatest Cancer on Democracy"
Eleanor Roosevelt famously said, "With freedom comes responsibility." That includes the responsibility of media outlets that use the word "news" to present factual information and clearly label their opinion programming and writing. And the responsibility of real news operations to report on lying media just as aggressively as they report on criminals, world events, and corrupt politicians.
Steve Schmidt, a man who's definitely no liberal (he was a White House advisor to George W. Bush and ran Bush's 2004 re-election campaign as well as John McCain's 2008 campaign), has been blunt about the impact of Fox "News":
"Rupert Murdoch's lie machine is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the poisoning of our democracy, and the stoking of a cold civil war. There has never been anything like it, and it is beyond terrible for the country. Bar none, Rupert Murdoch is the worst and most dangerous immigrant to ever arrive on American soil. There are no words for the awfulness of his cancerous network."
Robert Reich
It's official: Fox News is the propaganda mouthpiece of the Trump White House. How do I know? Not just because Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro are happy to appear on stage with Trump to campaign for Republican candidates. It's because the connection is now financial: Trump aide and former Fox News executive Bill Shine continues to get paid by Fox News. Shine formally resigned from Fox to become Trump's deputy chief of staff for communications last July. But Fox is continuing to make payments to Shine, totaling $3.5 million this year, and another $3.5 million in 2019.
What America Could Look Like Without Fox News
According to PRRI's 2022 American Values Survey, among the two-thirds of Americans who report consuming TV news, 17% say they most trust Fox News to give them accurate information about current events and politics—a number that is slightly larger than the proportion who most trust local TV news (15%), CNN (12%) or public television (12%). Only the combined broadcast news outlets (ABC, CBS, NBC) outpace Fox News as America's most trusted TV news source.
What would happen?
Republicans would dump Trump
The GOP would abandon efforts to restrict voter access and attempts at minority rule.
The country would be far less divided by the culture war battles over abortion, LGBTQ rights, and public schools.
No major political party in America would sanction the racist use of "Great Replacement Theory" rhetoric and the demonization of immigrants
American democracy would be far less threatened by the violent politics of white Christian resentment and Christian nationalism
5 facts about Fox News
Around four-in-ten Americans trust Fox News. Nearly the same share distrust it.
People who cite Fox News as their main source of political news are older and more likely to be white than U.S. adults overall.
The unique, damaging role Fox News plays in American media
There are four elements outside of Murdoch that make Fox News a uniquely damaging part of the American news landscape: its strength on the political right, the demonstrated way in which it shapes its viewers' beliefs, its grip on Republican power and the views of its leadership.
Fox News is getting pummeled by former evangelists. And it could get worse.
Padden, Solomon, and Reyner join a growing list of former Foxers who came to similar conclusions in recent times. For years, these people cashed Murdoch's checks, willfully blind to Fox News' role since its inception as a Republican Party megaphone. But as the network became increasingly unhinged, aided Donald Trump's ascension to the leadership of the GOP, and then reinvented itself as his personal propaganda apparatus, they became increasingly uncomfortable with the network's role, called it quits, and spoke out.
Carl Cameron, Fox's former chief political correspondent, was both one of the network's earliest hires and among the first to see the writing on the wall when he retired in 2017. He later explained that he had left because "over the years, the right-wing hosts drowned out straight journalism with partisan misinformation." Those hosts, he pointed out in a 2019 interview, were "allied" with Trump, and had access to the then-president that was "questionable, if not dangerous. It's not normal."
Ralph Peters, the former Fox strategic analyst...left the network, writing in a blistering op-ed that he was unwilling to continue working for a network that was "propagandizing for the Trump administration" and engaged in an "assault on our constitutional order."
Chris Wallace followed them out the door. "I'm fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion," he told The New York Times. "But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable."
Fox News is not news. Say it with me.
Fox "News" is a right-wing propaganda operation wrapped inside an entertainment channel. It does not adhere to the professional standards of journalism. And every moment it is allowed to operate under the guise of "news" gives it more credibility than it deserves as it chips away at our democracy.
The country faces an increasing number of existential crises, all of them exacerbated by Fox's steady diet of authoritarianism, racism, and fact-denying. It is closing minds that journalism exists to open.
Stop calling it news. Start describing it as a distributor of propaganda and disinformation. Call it the Fox News propaganda network. Or a right-wing messaging platform. Or political infotainment. Or something. Just not "news".
Why Fox News Lied to Its Viewers
Fox News isn't news
It is a purveyor of propaganda and misinformation. What it's not is a source of "news" — at least not by any normal definition.
According to Broockman and Kalla, when these Fox viewers watched CNN, they heard about all sorts of things Fox wasn't telling them. They processed that information. They took it in. They became more knowledgeable about what was really going on in the United States.
One lesson here is that Fox viewers are reachable with real news.
But the biggest takeaway for me is the realization that Fox viewers aren't just manipulated and misinformed — they are literally being made ignorant by their consumption habits. Watching Fox, they hear a lot of "news-like" things, but they don't learn about what's really happening.
And here's where we in the mainstream media can do something useful: We can stop talking about Fox like it's a different form of news — and start talking about how it isn't news at all. It's the opposite of news. It's instead of news. It's the absence of news.
Consuming cross-cutting media causes learning and moderates attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers
What happens when a group of Fox News viewers watch CNN for a month?
The findings suggest that political perspectives can be changed
Most of the CNN switchers stuck to the length of the task, according to the study. But once it was over, and the $15 an hour was taken away, "viewers returned to watching Fox News", Kalla said.
Fox is not a news network but a propaganda outlet
If your practice is to tell people what they want to hear rather than what you know to be true, you are not a journalist. You are an infotainer or a propagandist. Perhaps both.
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