Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Fact-Checking Site Finds Fox News Only Tells the Truth 18 Percent of the Time

Kimberly-Guilfoyle

For liberals, it’s not exactly “breaking news” to find out that Fox News is mostly comprised of misinformation or flat-out lies.  Anyone with even a shred of common sense can watch just a handful of their featured shows and see that the entire channel is nothing more than a propaganda mechanism for the Republican party.

Punditfact, a branch of Politifact, has put together profiles for CNN, MSNBC and Fox News detailing just how honest each of these networks are.  And while it’s obviously not a completely comprehensive profile (it would be nearly impossible to fact check every single thing said on each network) it’s a decent measure of the honesty of each. And what do you know, Pundifact found Fox News to have only told the truth 18 percent (15 of 83) of the time for the statements they checked.  And even of that 18 percent, only 8 percent of what they said was completely “True.”  The other 10 percent was rated as “Mostly True.” A staggering 60 percent (50 of 83) comments were found to be either “Mostly False,” “False,” or “Pants on Fire.” The other 22 percent were rated “Half True.” Essentially well over half of what Punditfact has fact-checked on Fox News has been a lie and only 18 percent has been deemed factual. To compare, CNN was found to have been honest about 60 percent of the time, while only having 18 percent of their comments found to be false.  As for MSNBC, they were found to have been honest about 31 percent of the time, while 48 percent of the comments they had fact-checked were deemed untrue. So while MSNBC’s numbers aren’t exactly worth bragging about, they’re still far better than the “fair and balanced” Fox News


Though I’m sure any conservative who might run across this article, or the Punditfact profiles, would simply dismiss the results as “liberally biased lies.” You know, because anything that’s not approved by Fox News or some other right-wing media source is clearly “liberally biased propaganda.” Which is really a fantastic piece of rhetoric, isn’t it?  Fox News, and other right-wing media sources, can lie as much as they want.  Then if any other source debunks the nonsense they’re spewing, the conservative media simply dismisses it as “lies perpetuated by the liberal media.” It’s how conspiracy theorists manipulate their sheep.  They perpetuate some kind of asinine conspiracy, then when it’s completely debunked, they claim the information debunking it is “all a part of the conspiracy.” And that’s exactly what the right-wing media does. Which is why tens of millions of conservatives believe that Fox News is a “fair and balanced” beacon of truth, despite the fact that Punditfact found only 18 percent of their comments to be factual among a fairly large sampling of 83 relatively important statements made on the network.

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