Many times I’ve seen Fox News' slogan “fair and balanced” and wondered if they really believed it.  Thanks to The Atlantic, not only am I sure they believe it, but now I understand why that slogan makes sense to them.

It’s not that Fox believes its journalism is “fair and balanced”.  It’s that Fox’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, believes that most of the other major media outlets are liberal leaning, so that by providing a conservative leaning media outlet, Fox provides total media balance.  Got it.  I may not agree with the assumptions, but at least there’s some sense of logic in there.

But given this logic, it seems like Fox’s slogan should be “fair and balancing”.  At least that way they could admit their conservative tilt while also suggesting that other outlets are liberal leaning, and we could have an intelligent debate about that.

The Atlantic article is about Murdoch’s purchase of the Wall Street Journal and his quest to unseat the New York Times as the paper of record.  It’s a pretty interesting article, which you can read here.

The article contains at least two interesting viewpoints about journalism and bias.  One viewpoint is that journalism should always strive to be as objective as possible.  Another viewpoint is that you need journalists to take sides, and the truth emerges through debate and conflict.  I think both are valid viewpoints, but if entire news organizations take sides, the viewer/reader is left with the task of making sure to consume media from multiple sides, weighing the arguments, and making a decision.  Sounds fine, but in practice I think what really happens is that people fall prey to confirmation bias and only consume the media that tells them that whatever they already believe is correct.  In other words, they consume media that tells them what they want to hear (that they're correct), not what they need to hear (who wants to ponder whether their beliefs are wrong?).

And you know, I'll be the first to admit that I don't watch Fox news regularly, if at all.  I've been a registered Democrat since the day I registered to vote.  I'm open to reading studies about media bias, but a quick web search on the topic yields a mess.  Lots of debates about biased research in studies of media bias.  More than I can try to untangle in an evening.

If any of you know of high quality studies of media bias, I'd be interested in reading them.