Pew: MSNBC’s Bias Far Worse Than Fox

-By Warner Todd Huston

This news is certainly no surprise to anyone on the right, but a new Pew study finds that MSNBC is far more biased than Fox News.

The Pew study, Winning The Media Campaign 2012, tracked the political coverage that President Obama and GOP nominee Mitt Romney received between the conventions and the final days of the campaign. The study of the media landscape (including social media) shows that Obama got a bit more positive coverage than Mitt Romney, but that his positive coverage took a nosedive after his miserable performance at the first debate.

But one of the more interesting aspects of the Pew study is the breakdown of bias from MSNBC and Fox News. This part of the study shows that MSNBC was far more biased against Romney than Fox was against Obama.

MSNBC featured 71 percent negative coverage of Mitt Romney whereas Fox coverage of Obama was only 46 percent unfavorable. What’s more, positive Romney stories on MSNBC reached all the way to a soaring three percent!

David Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun exactly pegs these results. Of MSNBC, Zurawik says, “That’s not a news channel.”

“That’s a propaganda machine, and owner Comcast should probably change [MSNBC President] Phil Griffin’s title from president to high minister of information, or something equally befitting the work of a party propaganist [sic] hack in a totalitarian regime. You wonder how mainstream news organizations allow their reporters and corrdespondents [sic] to appear in such a cauldron of bias.”

Why anyone considers commentators such as Chris “Tingles” Matthews, Ed Schultz, or Rachel Maddow anything other than complete propagandists is anyone guess, but this Pew study proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that there isn’t a single unbiased minute on MSNBC while Fox News appears to be far more balanced by comparison.

Another interesting part of the Pew study is that social media is even less forgiving than the Old Media establishment. This, of course, should also be no surprise. After all, social media is not expected to be unbiased. It is built on everyone’s opinion, not any even-handed coverage of the news.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.

For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.


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