A US university just released a survey which indicates (among other things) that Fox News was considered the most trusted TV news organization for accurate reporting - and by a large margin (27% chose it, vs 14.6% who chose CNN). Without wishing to get into an argument about whether this reflects the facts, I find it interesting that a station which is pretty clear about having a point of view is trusted more than stations which claim (rightly or wrongly) to be “neutral”. I think that the media ethic in the UK where (among the print media at least) most publications have an overt political ‘lean’ is in some ways more healthy than the US where points of view have to appear objective. At least if a point of view is up front you can ‘correct’ for it when assessing it. But it seems from this survey that viewers may not be looking for balance.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 2:13 pm and is filed under mass media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.