Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003 Location: Established in 1994
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Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2009 5:20 am Post subject: How influential is Fox News? |
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I ran across an interesting article over at Salon.com: Fox: the Socialist News Network
"A search of transcripts available on Lexis-Nexis -- a limited sample, unfortunately -- for Fox's programming from Tuesday shows that in the span of just six hours, the network managed to squeeze in five segments devoted to a discussion of impending socialism; the words "socialism," "socialist" and "social democracy" were used a total of 37 times...but I happened to see the show repeat one of the segments from "Special Report," for a total of six time slots on the subject between 4 p.m. ET and 11 p.m.
Admittedly, the channel wasn't nearly as socialism-heavy before Tuesday. A search of transcripts available for the weekday programming from last week, as well as this Monday, revealed only one additional segment, from "Hannity." There were 58 additional uses of the words "socialism," "socialist" and "social democracy," however. (It's also worth noting that none of these counts include the network's in-house advertising, which, from anecdotal observation Tuesday, seemed to be pushing Beck and Hannity's discussion of the issue pretty hard.)
We did the same search of CNN and MSNBC, over the same time period, and came up with only two occurrences of those key words -- both in the same night, from the mouth of Lou Dobbs, natch...
In a special touch, before [Shannon Bream] recited those figures she brushed away the correct definition of "socialism" that had been offered by the Center for American Progress' Heather Bouchey with a curt "semantics aside..."
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/
It strikes me that this might account, in part, for the GOP Congressional approval ratings to slip from 23% last month to 19% this month. (Gallup Poll). I don't think the public is buying scare tactics like this right now. I think the public is scared, but not scared of socialism. |
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