outfoxed

This is a review that I am writing as a part of my MIT Blogging course, although it has nothing to do with student eating, I think that it is an important topic that should be addressed, especially considering the current controversy involving the White House and The Fox News Network.

The conservative nature of Fox news is no secret. It is a dilemma that we have explored in other mit courses, like Political Economy of the Media. I guess a bias is ever present, no matter how objective we try to be, but in hard news reporting, it is essential that the facts are presented without a strong opinion enforcing one view.

That seems to be the major issue explored in the Outfoxed documentary. Perhaps when watching Fox news, you do detect a strong conservative viewpoint, but it is definitely amplified in the way that the documentary was edited. The documentary does an excellent job of getting you on their side, the side that says Fox is a corrupted news network.

I do not think that the problem is the conservative views of Fox news, but how they call themselves a hard news channel. I do not think if they referred to their material as editorial, there would be as much of a controversy. The network has the right to produce content, but where they fail, is to enforce that these are opinions and not statements of fact.

People have different expectations from something like a personal blog, than they do with their news outlet. When I watch the news I expect to be presented with the facts, and allowed to form my own opinions on the matter. Maybe this is why I have never been one hundred percent reliant on a specific news source. I tend to look at a variety of sources, depending on what sort of news I am interested in hearing about. Ultimately, we have a responsibility to ourselves, to figure out our own opinions, rather than relying on one network to decide our views for us.