03.27.07
Fox on Steriods
Fox Viewers Agree – Just Like Anyone Brainwashed
Recently I’ve read a number of articles on the consistent alignment of Fox viewers in polls.
Basically the polls say that Fox viewers are more likely to support a conservative agenda than any other demographic group. This is backed up by at least one study shows that Fox is very effective at getting 3-8% of voters to switch to Republican candidates and at getting out the vote for previously non-voting conservatives. (Entry of a liberal news organization into a community has depressed voter turn-out at least once. I always thought the liberal agenda was confusing – & who can vote if you’re confused?.)
Several reasons are given :
- Fox’s goal to balance liberal coverage with a conservative slant and
- the lack of self-flagellation or acknowledgement when Fox pushes a story proven to be false
CNN had no trouble visiting Obama Barack’s elementary school and determining that it wasn’t a Muslim madrassah as claimed by Fox. Fox did not indulge in an orgy of self-investigation.
Fox Viewers Oblivious? I Don’t Think So.
I have a hard time buying that Fox viewers are so oblivious to their car radios, discussions at water coolers, school playgrounds and family gatherings, books and news magazines that they wouldn’t have a rational clue that that not everything that came out of a broadcaster’s mouth is 100% true.
I remember my first encounter with the difficulties of journalists getting things right. The write-up of my Jr. High School dance in the local paper bore no relation to the reality that I attended & there weren’t so many people that there that I wouildn’t have known if something was going on.
A teacher, the source for the story, felt her spin put the school in a better light. At the time I thought her spin had careened totally out of control and the journalist must have been smoking to accept her version.
If the story was so screwed up on an insignificant local item, how could people report completely accurately when high passions were involved?
My daughter is researching subliminal ads – ads that embed sexual images to increase the power of the ads. (While I haven’t read this particular book on the subject, it gives some online examples of what I am talking about.)
Fox Uses Subliminals?
Could Fox be embedding subliminals around their newscasters to give their message more oomph? Would another network be willing to try this to see if their stories become more convincing? (& then reveal the results?)
The original research in 1957 did not involve sex as the seller and was fairly rapidly discredited as either a real experiment or an effective result. There are lots of claims that it doesn’t work, but I can’t find a published study where someone tried to design the most effective use of subliminal advertising and then measures the effectiveness of them. (Of course, if these studies were done as part of a commercial effort to develop trade secrets they wouldn’t be published.)
Advertising is not supposed to contain subliminals in America or it could generate the loss of a broadcast license. Does this prohibition extend to news broadcasts?
Just A Thought.
