CNN is a joke. They have begun filling several prime time news hours with reality shows such as Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain.
I'm aware of Prime Time Hours, but I never knew there was such a thing as Prime Time News Hours. In any event, in the 5 hours between 7PM and midnight, CNN has 1 hour of news (2 if you count the 50% news of Anderson Cooper and Erin Burnett), and Fox News has 5 hours of opinion programming.
CNN cannot compete for viewership with Fox News. The Nielson ratings show CNN consistently gets badly beaten in ratings. In the 1980's and 90's, CNN had practically no competition. The emergence of FNC in the late 90's changed all that.
Other than ratings and dollars, what does that mean? Surely you aren't suggesting that higher ratings is somehow related in any way to accuracy in news reporting and journalistic integrity, are you?
There are no unbiased news channels because there are no unbiased people. Not on television nor in any other media outlet. It is much better for a bias to be announced than to pretend any thinking person is without bias.
Journalism is by its very nature has a liberal bias. It's a part of the Liberal Arts. There are obvious practical limitations (both space and time) to absolute journalistic neutrality including the inability of journalists to report all available stories and facts, and the requirement that selected facts be linked into a coherent narrative of the news stories. So just the selection of which events and stories that are reported and how they are covered becomes a bias in and of itself.
But the liberal bias can (and does with most of the major news organizations) still report the news within the constraints of the
Canons of Journalism. CNN for the most part does that. Fox News does not. You're right, it is much better for a bias to be announced, but since all journalism has an inherent liberal bias, announcing the obvious would be redundant in most cases. In the big picture of liberal journalism and media bias, a news organization can still be neutral within the Canons of Journalism. The problem comes when a news organization presents an intentional political agendized slant on the news. Then it becomes propaganda.
The problem with Fox News isn't that they distribute political agendized propaganda, it's that they present it as "Real journalism" which doesn't abide by the Canons of Journalism, and the proclaim themselves to he "Fair and Balanced," which is an impossibility with an intentionally slanted agenda driving their news.
The worse thing you can do is watch Fox News and think (or claim) that you're watching news. You're not. You are watching what can only be described as
explicit ideological media. Thanks to cable and the Internet, we have seen the rise of not so much the 24/7 news channel, but rather the rise of this explicitly ideological media being passed off as news. That makes the question of "bias" in news reporting somewhat moot in many cases, because it's not even news, it's explicit ideology. I mean, lets get real, if you're getting your news from a source you know to be to be liberal or conservative because it meets with your ideological views, then you're consuming the bias you're seeking. No need to pretend (or fool yourself) that it's anything other than that.
Anthony Bourdain's show is actually quite good. Best thing on CNN.
I've never seen it on CNN, but I assume it's more or less the same show that was on the Travel Channel.
It's a shame what has happened to HLN, which used to be called, and stand for, Headline News. They change the name to HLN because they wanted to get "news" out of the name. While the morning show does deliver straight news (along with awesome eye candy), the network ain't what it used to be. They used to be a tightly-formatted, 30-minute newscast that was rebroadcast each half-hour, 24 hours a day, with freshly-updated information throughout the day. Then, they shifted the format to long-form tabloid, opinion, crime, and entertainment news-related programming. In recent months they've shifted the network to re-focus things with an emphasis on social media, because what's trending on Twitter is apparently news.
Ironically, the news channel that presents the least amount of bias in its reporting, and follows the Canons of Journalism in textbook fashion, is also the one with the lowest ratings, by a wide margin. Anyone know what it is?
