The Rise of Politically Partisan Infotainment

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The Rise of Politically Partisan Infotainment

Consumers now have access to more information than in any other point in history, and are being subjected to partisan news on a larger scale than ever before. Partisan news outlets, such as Fox News and MSNBC tailor their broadcasts to appeal to the confirmation bias of their target audiences. Each network not only chooses which stories to run based on the interest of their target demographic, but also frames the facts in a way that leads consumers to believe that their own beliefs, however factual, are correct, which aligns with a scientific principle known as confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency for people to seek out information that aligns with their beliefs, while denying the legitimacy of information that opposes them.

Partisan news sources, such as Fox News no longer attempts to educate people so that they may make decisions about the truth of the world, but now exists primarily as a vehicle to tell people what the truth is, or to confirm a target demographics’ preconceived beliefs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Fox News impacts its consumers’ knowledge on current world and political events, and whether it has a positive or negative effect on the consumers’ overall knowledge. Two polls conducted by Farleigh Dickinson University, compared Fox News against its competitors, and what researchers found was people who only consumed information from Fox News were “less informed than those who say they don’t watch any news at all” (Cassino, 2011; Kelley, 2012; Study, 2012).

In a telephone study, conducted by Farleigh Dickinson University, researchers asked 1,185 adult consumers a series of questions, which included their age, sex, rac...

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Rothkopf, D. J. (2008). New media monkey-gland injections: A quick shot of sizzle. Superclass: the global power elite and the world they are making (pp. 232- 234). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Society of Professional Journalists: Improving and protecting journalism since 1909. (n.d.). SPJ Code of Ethics. Retrieved April 2, 2014, from http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

Study: Watching Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News. (n.d.). Slate Magazine. Retrieved March 5, 2014, from http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/01/30/does_watching_fox_news_make_you_less_informed.html

Wilde, O., & Dowling, L. C. (2001). The soul of man under socialism. The soul of man under socialism and selected critical prose (p. 148). London: Penguin Books.

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