The Fox News Effect

Fair and Balanced. Yeah, sure.

Yet there is no televised alternative.

Jonathan Klein, president of CNN, who continues to inch cable news network even further right than it already is, recently adding right wing hack Glen Beck to the roster, while the public, apparently incapable of critical thinking, accepts that CNN is a "left wing" perspective, even though there is virtually no coverage of anything from a "left" perspective, virtually no labor perspective or environmentalist perspective or any coverage of real issues about the looming American health care catastrophe or the genocide being conducted in Palestine or the destruction of the middle class, and even though CNN failed to ask any questions about the fraudulent elections in 2000 and 2004 or the Bush war for empire, even though CNN faithfully intersperses stock market performance reports throughout its newscasts without ever presenting information about 10 million manufacturing jobs lost to NAFTA and the continued outsourcing of American jobs driven by the stock market, etc.

We all know what Fox is, well, those of us who aren't delusional right wing schmucks, and why the right wing midwifed it into being, but what about the entirety of media and the quality of information provided by it?

How did our media system become so damaged, so incapable of supporting a democratic government with a free flow of unbiased information? And what can we do about it?

[...]
Yes, suggest data collected by two economists who found that the growth of the Fox cable news network in the late 1990s may have significantly boosted the Republican Party's share of the vote in the 2000 election and delivered Florida to Bush.

"Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its audience to shift its voting behavior towards the Republican Party, a sizable media persuasion effect," said Stefano DellaVigna of the University of California at Berkely and Ethan Kaplan of Stockholm University.
[...]