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Thursday, April 16, 2009

Oh, that pesky liberal bias of reality...

I was taking a brief break from my project report writing to watch an episode of the Daily Show online. When it pointed out some of the inevitable idiocy of the Fox News Channel, I thought I'd have a look at what Wikipedia, that fetid pit of "liberal" online scholarship, and Conservapedia, the love-able, hug-able, hate-filled alternative to an unbiased look at reality, had to say about it. My astute readers may recall that I have written previous tirades against Conservapedia as well as just laughed at its stupidity, so, with full disclosure, when I set out to compare the representation of Fox News between the two sites I fully expected to find something like this.

Wikipedia opens with a rather plain description of the corporation itself (how it fits into the overall corporate structure of the world and its present viewership), followed by a brief overview of the channel's history, and finally ending its introduction with a rather tame note:
Critics and some observers of the channel say that Fox News Channel promotes conservative political positions. Fox News Channel publicly denies any bias in the channel's reporting.
Of course, over at Conservapedia there is no letting mundane and boring facts get in the way of the ideological crazy, so their article leaps straight in with the opener:
The Fox News Channel is not as conservative as it pretends to be...
Like many things written at Conservapedia, that statement makes so little sense it is laughable. Fox News, after all, officially claims to be "Fair and Balanced", which precludes them from pretending to hold any sort of ideological bend. Of course, Fox News isn't much better journalistically than Conservapedia, so their claim of "Fair and Balanced" doesn't hold much water in my books either.

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