Every news organization has had controversies in the past, be it inaccurate reporting, false attributions, or straight up reporting lies. This is because they are all ran by human beings, who are not infallible. The mark of a good organization is how they deal with the aftermath, whether they issue retractions, corrections or apologies.
I don't frequent Fox, Breitbart or Infowars to know if and how often they do so, but I definitely do see it with orgs who are established and follow some journalistic standards. And this is not just so-called "left wing" MSM (I personally consider CNN to be center, maybe slightly center left), center-right orgs like WSJ and Financial Times do the same.
I pay attention to a wide variety of news from different sources. I often listen to NPR in the car. The local station has BBC news a couple of times a day and listen if I happen to be out then. All Things Considered is OK, but not quite as solid IMO. The BBC also does a better job of covering the entire world and US news in general tends to be very US-centric. I read a wide variety of news online checking in on news across the entire spectrum. I have even skimmed some extreme right sites from time to time just to see what they are saying.
I don't watch much news, but I do catch some British comedy shows that talk about politics. It's very interesting to see what a different culture is saying about the US. I also often watch Rachel Maddow because she does go the extra mile to get the facts right. I disagree with her sometimes when she starts opining, but she is one of the most accurate news people on TV when reporting the facts.
As I said earlier, MSNBC and CNN have a lot of opinion on air, especially in prime time. But there is an effort to report the facts, then they get various people on to interpret the facts. If I sift the opinions from the fact part of the programs, the fact parts, while not perfect, are not that bad. The opinion part is something else. I do wish there would be some delineation between the fact part and the opinion part like news programs had to do back when the Fairness Doctrine was there.
Fox is a different animal. They will show news clips deliberately edited to support their story, even if the clip tells the opposite of what actually happened. One example was when Hillary Clinton told people in Appalachia she was going to replace coal jobs with 21st century jobs. All Fox showed was her saying coal jobs were going away. I also remember an Obama appointee who was forced out of her job when Fox aired something she said in a speech out of context over and over again.
Fox also selectively tells certain stories for political significance and then drops them with no comment as soon as they aren't relevant anymore. The Benghazi committee in the House is one example. They went on and on and from Fox's coverage you'd think it was a Watergate scale scandal, but when Hillary lost the election, the committee disbanded with a thin report saying they found squat and Fox didn't say boo about it.
Up until Trump's election, various right wing outlets including Fox as well as Rush Limbaugh and others would go on and on about main stream media bias if other news outlets didn't bend over backwards to try and cast the Republican/Democratic divide as at least two groups equally nuts and candidates as two sides of one coin when one was obviously incompetent or sounding like a loon and the other could actually make sense. CNN especially fell for this hard.
I'm not coming from the left, I actually started right of center. My family is all Republican and my father has always been very up on politics. My parents always talked about how the Bay Area elites went out of their way to get Nixon and most other presidents had been guilty of pretty much the same. But aside from the Nixon believer thing, they were otherwise Eisenhower Republicans. Generally somewhat fiscally conservative, within reason and socially libertarian. My father actually encouraged my sister to achieve more than he did me and she became a petroleum Geologist.
In the 1980s I saw the corruption creeping into the party. I wasn't aware of what Lee Atwater was going until after he was dead, but I could see the truth distortion field he created. The Republicans began then shifting from governing to just winning elections with no thoughts to actually governing responsibly. I also saw the party begin to ratchet to the right under me.
I left the Republicans behind in the late 80s. My father, who didn't see the corruption, beat on me until 2016 about how I had abandoned the party, but I was on my own path. Through the 90s I was extremely independent, but as the country ratcheted to the right, the edges of the Democratic party started lining up with my own politics and the Republican party went from distasteful to dangerously mad. So I started voting Democratic most of the time around 2000.
I remember a segment on MSNBC where Rachel Maddow went through all the things Eisenhower stood for and how that contrasts with the modern Republican party. At the end she declared she was an Eisenhower Republican (her stated political beliefs have a big overlap with the Eisenhower Republican positions). I've always been one. It's just that anyone who actually believes the same things the Eisenhower Republicans did and actually walks the talk is now a moderate Democrat. That's how much the political spectrum has shifted over the last 60 years.
I say all this to point out that I'm not some extreme lefty trashing right wing media because it doesn't fit my bias. I'm quick to call BS on MSNBC or CNN or anyone else when they cross the line too. The average news outlet probably gets at least a few things factually wrong a day. Most of those errors are not substantive to the story, but they make maybe a few serious mistakes a week. Most of the time they are quick to issue retractions when they realize their mistake.
Fox News makes substantive factual errors much more frequently and only issues retractions when pressure requires them to and only in the most quiet way possible.
A few years ago someone did a study on how many facts about American politics people could get right and correlated that with where people got their news. Fox News viewers got more facts wrong than people who did not pay attention to any political news. It is only one study, I would like to see it repeated by someone else, but I wasn't terribly surprised by the results.
I totally agree that one should expose themselves to multiple points of views in order to get the full picture of what is going on. However, this does not mean we should give equal time and attention to all news organization for the sake of being balanced. I will gladly supplement my news from CNN or MSNBC with WSJ, Economist or FinTimes and maybe even Fox. But I will absolutely not waste anytime reading news from Infowars and Breitbart because they have never had a track record of journalistic integrity. They may one day be a legitimate news source, but as of now, they have not earned my trust.
The WSJ is a mixed bag. I did subscribe some years back and their reporting was very good quality, though always with a business oriented slant (not R or D political, more pro-business than anything else). The editorial page was a mixed bag 25 years ago, but it became a right wing screed machine at some point in the last couple of decades (though this was happening before the News Corp purchase). The editorial page now mostly echoes the views of Fox.
Well, there's Sinclair which is in some ways far more dangerous than Fox. Fox you either trust or you don't but at least their bias (or lack thereof depending on your perspective - you could substitute MSNBC for Fox above depending on your perspective) is clear and present, but when your local news station is feeding you distortions or lies as if they were real stories, it can slip by the radar. Local news is generally considered / expected to be unbiased (beyond being biased in favor of their locality), as they don't typically have any political affiliations.
List of stations owned or operated by Sinclair Broadcast Group - Wikipedia
Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...vative-local-news-giant-with-a-growing-reach/
Even the guy who used to be President & COO of News Corp said it was "
Insidious"
Sinclair airs politically slanted pieces
like this and
this, and pretends they're local segments.
The real danger in Sinclair Broadcast’s ‘fake news’ scandal
(bolding mine)
We can disagree on whether a clearly left or right organization is more or less biased than the other. But at least Fox / MSNBC / etc are clearly what they are. Sinclair is a symptom of a deeper corruption of the media, that is harder to see if not for their lazy lack of foresight to send the same script to every station (had they changed them up to avoid avoid similarities, it would have gone unnoticed).
We really need a clear separation between factual news, editorial/opinion on the news, and "entertainment" (which is how anyone can get away with lying and/or being intentionaly misleading). And the lines between these should not be allowed to be blurred. Freedom of the press and the first amendment are important, but they're both being abused to damage our democracy.
John Oliver had a great piece on Sinclair back in 2017:
The Constitution protects news media, which is a good thing, but we need a definition of what is news and what is propaganda or opinion and the latter should not be labeled news. However I don't see that happening while a propaganda network is at the top of cable ratings and companies like Sinclair and Clear Channel are filling local airwaves with their spin.
IMO news is factual based reporting of events which attempts to convey what happened with as little bias as possible. Completely eliminating bias is not completely possible, but some news outlets like the BBC and CBC do a descent job. Better than many American news organizations at least. When substantive factual errors are discovered, the news organization needs to put out a correction as prominently as the original story. This can't be a perfect system, news is reported by humans and reporting is a bit of art which is hard to quantify and measure. But we need something better than what we have today.
