Raise your hand if you’re surprised by this one.
In covering the Iraq war last year, 73 percent of the stories on Fox News included the opinions of the anchors and journalists reporting them, a new study says.
By contrast, 29 percent of the war reports on MSNBC and 2 percent of those on CNN included the journalists’ own views.
These findings — the figures were similar for coverage of other stories — “seem to challenge” Fox’s slogan of “we report, you decide,” says the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Seem to challenge? How terribly polite.
One other tidbit jumped out at me.
As for the most popular prime-time shows, nearly every story — 97 percent — contained opinion on Fox’s “O’Reilly Factor.”
I found this kind of hard to believe. A whopping three percent of O’Reilly’s stories were free of opinion? How could he let that happen? Maybe he was off those days and his replacement dropped the ball.
One has to assume O’Reilly will be flirting with 100% by next year’s report.