Fox News Channel: Fair and Balanced?

Thanks to all of you who participated in the house parties last weekend featuring the film “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdochs’s War on Journalism.” More than 30,000 people from various media reform groups gathered in over 3000 house parties across the country. The film, confirmed in vivid detail what many already knew, Fox News Channel (“FNC” or “Fox”) is neither “fair” nor “balanced,” but intentionally designed to promote a partisan point of view.

Here are some links for O’Reilly:Windows Media (Broadband)

Windows Media (56k Modem)

In response to the film and the positive reaction from our members, Common Cause and MoveOn.org are launching a petition to urge the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to initiate a complaint against Rupert Murdoch’s FNC for deceptive practices in the advertising and marketing of its news programs

Please sign the petition and urge your friends and family to do the same. Our goal is to collect hundreds of thousand of signatures to impress upon the FTC that Fox’s use of the slogan “fair and balanced” is unacceptable and should be stopped.

We believe Fox News Channel has violated FTC rules and that FNC programming is intentionally and unapologetically one-sided, as evidenced by the Outfoxed film and recent studies by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).

While Fox has no legal obligation to be “fair or “balanced,” the Federal Trade Commission Act requires that it not use deceptive ads to promote its programs. By any objective standards, FNC’s programming is neither “fair” nor “balanced:” For example,

FNC Network management instructs line producers and correspondents to structure their coverage of events in a way that specifically promotes the positions of the current Administration and the Republican Party.

A study of the “Special report with Brit Hume” for the last six months of 2003 concluded that conservative guests outnumbered progressive guests five to one.

A recent survey showed that much higher percentages of viewers whose main source of news is FNC have misperceptions about indisputable facts about the war in Iraq, than do viewers of other news outlets.

So please sign our petition and join us in taking on Fox at:http://www.commoncause.org/action/petition_ftc.cfm

Please click here to read the complaint filed with the FTC.