Fox News is Biased

I appreciate my opponent's response, and will address some of the key issues brought forth by my opponent using his RD 1 order and tag lines. Point 1: In response to my arguments regarding the standard level of bias in the media, my opponent alleges that I make a false comparison between state-run media & what I will call "free enterprise media," which is essentially just media that is more independently controlled, and therefore assumed to be (to some degree) more objective. He also claims that he can prove (via the preponderance of evidence burden I give him in RD 1) that Fox News is grossly more biased than all other news stations in the US. I will address the latter claim when I address "point 2," as this is where his evidence lies. As for the former claim, it glances over every legitimate argument that I made regarding levels of standard bias, and only focuses on a single clause of an entire paragraph of analysis. Therefore, I would like readers to extend the incredibly important and fair burden I place on the Pro. He is required to prove to you that Fox News, in fact, does exceed the level of bias that one has come to expect from all other media sources in order to win this debate. Point 2: This is where my opponent introduces his evidence of Fox's surpassing partiality, as well as drops most of my key points regarding the obligations and responsibilities of the American public. I will begin by addressing the evidence provided. My opponent states that, because [x] percentage of self-identified Fox News viewers are incredibly ignorant about the proposed universal healthcare bill, that must mean that Fox News is undeniably unfair in their coverage of all news. He states in RD 1: "Though this poll only proves that Fox News viewers are uninformed when it comes to the health care debate, I would argue that this represents a larger pattern of misinformation and bias exhibited by Fox News." There are two problems with relying on this poll, and this poll alone, to prove that Fox News meets the burden established in RD 1: 1. As he says himself, the poll only proves that Fox's demographic is ill-informed. The poll, however, makes no claim that it can accurately correlate this ignorance to Fox's coverage. My opponent provided no news stories from Fox that claim HR 3200 contains any of the provisions that Fox's viewers seem to think it does. The more logical and likely scenario is that this misinformation was circulated via political discourse outside of the news room. For example, the alleged "death panels" that the bill supposedly creates was popularized by a political activist named Betsy McCaughey. [1] All major media stations tend to cover the frenzied town hall meetings and multiple pundits and "political experts" that invent and own these misconceptions, but they tend not to peddle them. My opponent needs to prove that Fox News is either inventing these falsehoods or directly supporting their credibility to even come close to proving Fox's involvement in the healthcare misconceptions. 2. This evidence does nothing to negate a citizen's obligation to seek out the truth. Per my analysis and evidence in RD 1, a vast majority of American citizens are well aware of the media's bias, and are therefore responsible for their own fact finding. Even if the Pro can prove conclusively that Fox is spreading blatant misinformation (which he has yet to do), since the American public realizes that this is a possibility, the American public has the duty to locate and consider alternate sources. If citizens are not being forcibly limited from finding alternative news sources and reports by Fox's broadcasts, then Pro cannot claim them to meet his definition of "biased." As a final note on this second point, I want to make sure that readers extend all of the arguments I made regarding the agency of the citizen to take responsibility for his or her own ideologies. This was, by far, the most important argument I made in RD 1, and it went entirely unaddressed. In a country in which free enterprise media exists, and especially in a country that is peopled with free citizens who clearly understand that media is inherently untrustworthy on face (see all of my evidence in RD 1 for proof), the obligation of each citizen to accept ownership for his or her opinion is paramount. As stated earlier, at the point where citizens *know* that they cannot trust the first news story that they hear and have a true plethora of other sources to verify the accuracy of information, the Pro has no ground to claim that Fox News "prevents objective consideration of an issue or situation." [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com...