Experiment

We had a nice weekend up north, which was an enjoyable visit with family. We cleaned up part of Dad's basement, found out the wedding date is Oct 30, and finally Tim & Chris spent enough time with some of their cousins to at least get to know them a little. Too bad Nick was impossible to convince to show up; I believe he would have had a good time.

So I had a chance to run a little experiment on the news media. The topic was the flap about Carl Rove. If you don't know who the heck Rove is or what the flap's about, that's OK, because the exercise was much less about the specific issue than about how the news media reports on things.

I was able to catch reports on the topic by each of the major networks (NBC/CBS/ABC), then the report from Fox News. It was amazing. The three major networks basically did the story the same way - offering pretty much no facts, but repeating the allegations and what Democrats were saying about it. And what Democrats were suggesting was that Rove committed treason and should immediately either resign or be fired from his job at the White House.

Then there was Fox News, where they actually dug into the facts of the case. They presented information about what has been publicly released about what has been alleged, what seems to have actually happened, what the parties involved said about it, and where the investigation stands. And the conclusion of anyone seeing the story is nearly opposite of the conclusion one might reach after seeing the version of the story done by the big 3 networks.

So, which manner of reporting is better and shows less bias? That of Fox News, which presented all available facts, or that of ABC/NBC/CBS, which presented a high-level overview of the "charges" followed by what Democrats are saying about it?

If people want to say that Fox News is a right-wing propaganda machine, this particular story would seem to demonstrate the opposite is true. We're getting satellite TV hooked up today, finally, and it will be interesting to perform my experiment on future news stories.