On November 11th, 2010, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow interviewed Comedy Central's Jon Stewart. They discussed the state of cable news, focusing heavily on the Fox News Channel, MSNBC's rival and the frequent subject of Stewart's satire and criticism. The interview was an open conversation, with both Maddow and Stewart offering personal views. At one point, Maddow leveled this criticism at her network's chief competitor:

[Fox News] never criticized George W. Bush for anything, even when he was doing things that were sort of not conservative. They never criticized him.

We find this claim to be false. It demonstrates the stridence, bombast, and essentialism that characterizes cable news today, ironically the subject of Maddow and Stewart's conversation. With this claim, Maddow expresses the sentiment that Fox News is a biased organization, a defensible sentiment, but she does so at the expense of the facts. In an effort to call out cable news personalities and implore them to change their tone, we are calling this statement false, and the majority of Truthsquad participants agree.

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On November 11th, 2010, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow interviewed Comedy Central's Jon Stewart. They discussed the state of cable news, focusing heavily on the Fox News Channel, MSNBC's rival and the frequent subject of Stewart's satire and criticism. The interview was an open conversation, with both Maddow and Stewart offering personal views. At one point, Maddow leveled this criticism at her network's chief competitor:

[Fox News] never criticized George W. Bush for anything, even when he was doing things that were sort of not conservative. They never criticized him.

We find this claim to be false. It demonstrates the stridence, bombast, and essentialism that characterizes cable news today, ironically the subject of Maddow and Stewart's conversation. With this claim, Maddow expresses the sentiment that Fox News is a biased organization, a defensible sentiment, but she does so at the expense of the facts. In an effort to call out cable news personalities and implore them to change their tone, we are calling this statement false, and the majority of Truthsquad participants agree.

NewsBusters called Maddow's claim to our attention, offering a long list of instances in which Fox News commentators criticized President Bush during his administration, many of which are listed in the Truthsquad links under "Oppose."

Some Truthsquad participants, such as highly rated NewsTrust reviewer Michael Shaver, felt that these counterexamples were "taken out of context," and that many of them were actually "contradictory to the point they were making" about Fox commentators criticizing then-President Bush. However, it seems pretty clear to us from the NewsBusters list, all of which link to the original transcripts for full context, that these are direct criticisms of the Bush administration, many of them on fundamental policy positions, and most of them made by prominent Fox News personalities.

Other participants, such as Shawn Kerry Inlow and Jan Wilson, felt that it was Maddow's remark that was taken out of context, and that what she really meant was not "never" but "more like 'really, practically never.'" But this is exactly the kind of friendly interpretation upon which cable news personalities rely. Maddow did not say "virtually never;" she said "never" twice. She said "they never criticized George W. Bush for anything." This is factually untrue, and we have to point it out.

Maddow's colleague Keith Olbermann made a similar claim in a special comment later in the week:

While Fox may be such, we are not doctrinaire, I cannot prove it, so I'll have to estimate it here, and if I am proved wrong, I will happily correct it. but my intuition tells me I criticized President Obama more in the last week than Fox's primetime hosts criticized President Bush in eight years.

Since we're fact-checking Maddow and not Olbermann, the judges have not reviewed the whole week of Olbermann transcripts to count his criticisms of Obama, but this Truthsquad found 18 Fox News criticisms of Bush in the first day of fact-checking, and we doubt it would be difficult to uncover more. As Maddow and Stewart agree in their conversation, and as Olbermann claims at other points in his comment, which network is more biased than the other is tangential to the point. The problem here is the use of emotive tone and distorted facts instead of measured, journalistic rigor. We criticized Fox's Business channel for this last week, and in two other Truthsquads, and we have chosen MSNBC this week to make a point. Cable news is rife with distortions on all sides.

With that said, this was a difficult Truthsquad for many participants because of the widespread impression that Fox News is deeply flawed as a journalistic organization. When we published this verdict, 74 participants had voted "False" out of the total of 119, but 25 had voted "True," and 20 were "Not Sure." (Note: several participants also asked for more options than "True," "false," or "not sure" for their answers, a reasonable request which we are now considering). The "True" voters who entered comments spoke about "the big picture," calling the Fox News organization "politically motivated."

These feelings can be supported by fact; the Wikipedia article "Fox News Channel controversies," posted under the neutral links, has an average NewsTrust rating at press time of 4.8, and several of the supporting links show examples of Fox News engaging in high-level efforts to influence public opinion in favor of George W. Bush. On November 18th, Howard Kurtz published an interview with Fox News chairman Roger Ailes in which Ailes described the executives at NPR as "Nazis." This certainly suggests a degree of bias in the organization that reaches the highest level. Fox News has 346 reviews on NewsTrust, and the average rating for the source is 2.6, which is much too low to be considered one of our trusted sources.

But this Truthsquad is fact-checking a claim made on a different cable news network that is demonstrably untrue, and Fox's reputation on NewsTrust does not affect the facts. Maddow is a journalist, but her opinions about Fox News clouded the facts in this case. In our effort to promote good journalism, we have to point out this statement as false.

After his review of the NewsBusters article, Michael Shaver made a comment that eloquently expressed the crisis of journalism in cable news, which the judges feel would make an excellent conclusion to this verdict:

What's outstanding to me is that a seasoned journalist such as Ms. Maddow would put herself in this position... [T]hink about how different this conversation would be if Rachel would've added a simple qualifier at the end of that statement. All she really needed to say was "they never criticized him in the same manner that they have criticized many others including president Obama." ...

I think the single biggest problem that we face with the journalism of today is the fact that it can be taken out of context so easily. What is far more disturbing is the willingness we have to accept it without questioning it. Something most people don't think about is that when these news outlets amplify the rhetoric while making absurd claims and delivering them in the most partisan manner possible they have created a unique niche and a very successful business model.

Cable news has found that eschewing journalistic rigor can be an effective way to make their content profitable. We amateurs and professionals who care about facts and integrity in the news have to point out bad journalism on all sides, if we want to restore integrity to the media.

-- Jon Mitchell, on behalf of NewsTrust Editors
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