Fox News's detrimental impact on America

Thanks to my opponent for initiating this debate. It provided me with an opportunity to debunk many of the criticisms of Fox, to expose fallacies in surveys, and to point out Fox's important role in bringing earnest debate to American politics.Pro initiated the debate with the rule, "2. A forfeit or concession is not allowed." He forfeited R4. Pro didn't say what the penalty is for doing something not allowed, so that's up to the voters. I call for a resolution of disapproval from the United Nations General Assembly.Pro made four contentions in the challenge. The third contention was "manipulation of several communication methods." He never argued that, although perhaps he thought pointing to the MediaMatters web site addressed it. It's not my job to construct Pro's case, so that contention was effectively dropped. The fourth contention was "other negative tendencies" which were never spelled out.That leaves two contentions that Pro attempted to prove. The first was "blatant bias in favor of conservative ideology." That divides into straight news reporting and commentary. I cited an objective study by UCLA that showed Fox's news reporting was the fourth least-biased of twenty media outlets analyzed, being as biased to the right as ABC is to the left. I didn't see any rebuttal from Pro.Fox News does have an overall conservative bias in their commentary, just as the New York Times has a liberal bias in their editorial pages. Pro failed to show why offering a different political viewpoint supported the resolution of being "detrimental to the electorate." In fact, I claimed that being the principle television outlet for the conservative viewpoint was a positive value to the electorate, and Pro did not dispute that contention, saying he was dropping it as "not necessarily important to affirm/negate the resolution." That concedes my point. I noted that even though MSNBC is very biased to the left, I thought their existence served the electorate by presenting a different viewpoint.That leaves one Pro contention to consider, that Fox spreads misinformation. Pro cites some surveys that correlate misinformation with viewing Fox, and conclude Fox is at fault. The surveys cited reach that conclusion by making three errors: 1. Correlation does not prove causation, a classic fallacy. People form erroneous conclusion entirely on their own. I cited the data that 57% of 2008 Obama voters incorrectly thought Republicans controlled Congress. No media outlet anywhere, to my knowledge, ever promoted that misconception, yet Democrats figured it out for themselves based upon bad reasoning. 2. People know a lot about the mistakes of their opponents, but little about the misinformation of their own side. So if a survey wants to make an opponent look foolish, they must focus on misinformation that's important to the side of the person making the survey. Surveys prejudiced to misinformation liberals believe important makes conservatives look uninformed. Conservatives could make a survey about misconceptions on gun rights or Benghazi or whatever interests them, and liberals would look uninformed.3. Pro cherry picked the surveys, including the FDU survey that concealed the number of respondents in the dubious category of people who responded to a news media survey while claiming to never use any news media. PolitiFact checked the claims of misinformed Fox voters and found, "it’s not enough to show a sliver of evidence that Fox News’ audience is ill-informed. ... It’s simply not true that "every poll" shows that result. So we rate his claim False.'" I think that PolitiFact has a significant liberal bias, and others think they are impartial. I know of no one who thinks there are conservative.Pro pointed to MediaMatters for example of alleged Fox bias. Pro didn't list any of the charges, but invited us to read the list and make his case for him. Since Pro raised no specifics himself, all I need do is quote a source, biased or not, that refutes them generally. I did that by citing evidence that Media Matters is so fanatically opposed to Fox that, among other things, they considered hiring private detectives to dig up dirt that could be used to attack Fox reporters. Even though it was not necessary, I went ahead and considered a sample of the Media Matters charges. Claims that Karl Rove lied were simply false. A Fox news report that Obama's half brother thought Obama might be favorable to Muslims, hardly an accusation at all, was twisted by Media Matters as a claim that Fox was saying Obama himself is Muslim. Other Media Matters claims had to do with commentary that MM thought was not adequately refuted by others on the program. The criticisms are so strained as be ridiculous.Positive benefits of Fox NewsI made six contentions regarding the value of Fox.1. Fox has expanded the audience for cable news with an audience about equal to all competitors combined. The average Fox viewer is slightly better informed than viewers of the network morning news shows. Fox, like the network shows informs about topics ranging from health to schools to business, and not so much about what's happening in Egypt. Nonetheless it's a benefit to the electorate to be more informed on soft news subjects. Pro did not contest this contention and said he would not.2. Fox serves serious news viewers.Viewers or O'Reilly (the top Fox show) and other evening commentary programs are in the top of most-informed viewers. Pro didn't dispute this, but claimed that average viewers are misinformed, a false claim a discussed above. It benefits the electorate to dish up serious commentary.3. Pro concedes that Fox is a significant source of political debate. Pro didn't dispute my claim, but argued that O'Reilly is sometimes rude and that's bad. Yes, O'Reilly is sometimes rude, but his rants are rare and only serve to diminish his credibility. It's not at all characteristic of Fox news, and it's not going to harm the serious news viewers that comprise his well-informed audience. If being impolite is damaging, then the frequent wild and directly insulting rants of Pierce Morgan (CNN) and Ed Schultze (MSNBC) would surely have brought down the Republic. Rants on DDO should have endangered the entire world. It's better to be uniformly polite, but it's not a big deal. Most of Fox features balanced one-on-one debate between legislators, politicians, pundits, and lawyers. Debate is valuable to the electorate.4. Fox covers stories not featured elsewhere, like the problem with President Obama claiming for two weeks that the Benghazi attack arose from a protest of YouTube video when CIA interviews with evacuees the next day revealed there was no protest at all. Pro said it's all smears, but the fact remain. The Administration ultimately admitted there was no protest.Fox countered smears of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries, and Sen. Clinton acknowledged Fox's fairness. The electorate is offered news not covered elsewhere, and that's valuable.5. Fox offers more libertarian viewpoints than any other television source. Libertarians have regular programs on Fox, like that of John Stossel. Pro argued that libertarians don't watch television. That's doubtful, but if true the Fox is reaching non-libertarians with the significant audiences of their programming. that serves the electorate with an important viewpoint rarely found elsewhere.6. Pro did not contest my claim that Fox was the most important television outlet for conservative commentary. Again, having multiple viewpoints serves the electorate.In this debate, please consider that my opponent forfeited a round contrary to his rules. He used the extremely weak Media Matters site as a source attempting to provide bias, and he provided no objective sources comparable to the UCLA study. He did not contend my arguments 1 and 6, and did not answer any of my rebuttals.