Cable News

Brief

Before diving deep into why cable news can often be biased, one may firstly need a debrief of what being biased means in association to cable news. The term biased dealing with cable news from my outlook is whenever a news outlet sources provides information to their audience, but it is merely opinion based and does not have substantial evidence to support those claims.

 

 If one has observed any version of live or a recording of any news sources, then it can easily observed that many outlets only give their personal synopsis of certain topics to which not only creates a sense of whether their statements are factual or truthful, but it also hurts the ratings due to the viewership decrease from this specific topic. 

 Though, the claim stated above about cable news being biased could damage how many people view their networks, it is said in an article on https://blog.reputationx.com/what-makes-us-drawn-to-negative-online-content  that the audience enjoys the biased news, but why? The answer is that people love drama and that it immediately draws people towards it rather than positive unbiased news because it can often be referred to as ‘boring’. Negativity Sells!

After much research, it can be determined that the top rating news outlet that is biased would have to be Fox News. It currently charts at 24.56 for providing biased content and 23.16 for reliable content. From the list shown below, that is quite a bit more than all of its competitors. 

Here’s a quick rundown of a few noteworthy news sources. 

Bias scores are on the left, reliability on the right:

 

     The New York Times - (-4.01 , 47.5)

      The Wall Street Journal – (1.89 , 48.33)

      The Washington Post – (-4.18 , 43.73)

     CNN – (-5.69 , 42.22)
 Fox News Channel – (24.56 , 23.16) 

Vox- ( 8.75 , 41.97)

NPR – (-2.73 , 49.9)

Mother Jones – (-13.92 , 37.31) 

The Daily Wire – (16.35 , 24.39)

 

The first biased controversy that I discovered occurred in 2020 through the network known as ‘Fox News’ https://www.foxnews.com/media/peter-navarro-abruptly-cut-from-cnn-jake-tapper-trump-covid, where their reporter Jake Tapper cuts his guest Peter Navarro out of the news segment due to his comment that the network ‘is not honest with the American people’. He also began to converse about the former president Trump to which Tapper was not fond of due to his close relationship of working under the president. Not only was this act very childish to put his guests off the set for his opinions to which he can rightfully disagree on, but it was also unprofessional to not let the guy express what his opinions followed by facts to get his point across. I honestly thought that was the point of news outlets- to tell your story!

Another controversy that was completely biased was the article published by the ‘New York Times’ https://www.allsides.com/news-source/new-york-times and later reposted by MSNBC. The article was concerning the death of an officer that lost his life during the raid of the capital in early January of 2021. New York Times published the story, but falsely diagnosed the former officers death with ‘being beaten with an extinguisher’, yet the autopsy provided evidence that showed that he died of natural causes. Officer Sicknick was in fact on duty during the incident, it is believed that he had no injury’s from it. Not only was this a horrific event that injured and killed many that day, but it is also disrespectful for the writers to spin this poor mans death to be relevant to the attack on the capital.