Star Spangled Staggers

US politics from outside the beltway

Fox News shows you how to bury a poll

Who's leading the election? Fox News would rather not say

By Alex Hern Published 19 July 2012 10:52

US President Barack Obama speaks during a campaign event at Austin Music Hall in Austin, Texas. Photograph: Getty Images

Fox News, like many American news organisations, commissions twice-monthly polls of the US election. This week's shows a four-point lead for Obama:

So how does FoxNews.com report this news? It's not even a particularly large margin - in five of the last ten Fox News polls, Romney's been closer.

Well, that was a finding in the poll. Sixty-four per cent of Americans think "government is the problem", while just 23 per cent think "government is the solution to the problem"; although even then, the question is about "government", rather than "the government", so illustrating it with a picture of Obama is a teensy bit misleading.

Of course, bad news for Obama does make it into the write-up:

By a 12 percentage-point margin, more voters say the Obama administration has made the economy worse.

But what about the electoral polling? After all, that's what it's all about, right?

Not a mention. In fact, Mitt Romney isn't mentioned at all in the piece. Which is one way to bury bad news.

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4 comments

Tue, 2012-07-24 20:05 — rcroy72

You have it right on, we have elections for a reason. WE have had
polls ad nausea ever since the last election.

The so-called main stream media in the US is so enamored with Obama
that they are practically campaigning for him.

Fox News has dissenting opinions on TV all day long, just watch instead of believe
all the negative crap you hear.They don't have the largest viewership for nothing.

Mon, 2012-07-23 08:39 — YouMisinformedBrits (not verified)

CBS did this same thing last week, but in an attempt to make Obama look good instead. It was obscene. Go the Media Research Center's website and read the story. FoxNews is not only the most trusted news source in the US, but is consistently cited as the most balanced news source in the US by third party media think tanks such as George Mason University's Center for Media and Public Affairs.

Mon, 2012-07-23 14:49 — M. E. (not verified)

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Robert_Lichter :

"
Criticism and Response

Some critics, such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and the Columbia Journalism Review, have criticized Lichter and the CMPA for holding a conservative bias of their own or for being funded by conservative foundations.
Nonetheless, major media outlets regularly carry stories based on the CMPA's studies, and the organization was described by the Los Angeles Times' Tom Rosenstiel as "non-partisan" in an interview in the D.C.-based City Paper (2/30/90). USA Today (6/28/91) also described Lichter's methodology as "non-partisan", and Newsday (3/4/92) characterized his research as "non-ideological." After a Washington Post article referred to CMPA as "conservative," the Post published a "Clarification", which concluded, "The center describes itself as nonpartisan, and its studies have been cited by both conservative and liberal commentators." (2/9/00)
"

So I guess CMPA knows something about how to bury a partisan position...