Day: February 7, 2013
Poll: Approval of Fox News Drops 9 Percentage Points
-9%
Percentage drop in approval of Fox News, according to a new PPP survey. The poll found that only 41 percent of Americans trust Fox News while 46 percent do not, which is down from 49-37 percent in 2010. The source of the collapse was a rising distrust of the Republican propaganda outlet by independent voters.
Nine out of 10 Americans Support Background Checks for All Gun Buyers
91%
Percentage of Americans who support background checks for all gun buyers, according to a Quinnipiac University poll.
Voting Level in 2012 Was Average
129,058,169
Number of votes cast in the November 2012 presidential election. The eligible population of voters is 221,925,820, so the percentage who voted was 58.2 percent, making the turnout exactly in the middle of the previous 17 elections — better than eight but worse than eight.
Federal Deficit Continues to Shrink under Obama
The federal budget deficit will drop below $1 trillion for the first time in President Barack Obama’s tenure in office, a new report said Tuesday. The Congressional Budget Office analysis said the government will run a $845 billion deficit this year, a modest improvement compared to last year’s $1.1 trillion shortfall but still enough red ink to require the government to borrow 24 cents of every dollar it spends.
This is news you’ll never see reported on Fox.
MSNBC’s Liberal Hosts Question the Obama Administration’s Drone Strike Program
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During the presidency of George Bush, Fox News operated as an adjunct to the White House political office (or was it vice versa?). That’s why, if there were Fox hosts who had concerns about the many nefarious activities of the Bush administration — breaking the international anti-torture treaty that Ronald Reagan signed or deliberately betraying the covert identity of a CIA specialist in the WMD black market, for example — they rarely, if ever, voiced their criticisms on air.
I don’t watch Fox 24/7, so I can’t say that it never happened, but if it did, questioning Bush-Cheney policies was never given the high-profile airing that concerns about the Obama administration’s drone strike program have been given by liberal hosts on MSNBC this week. This is notable because it upends the meme in the political media — of which Andrew Sullivan is a prime exemplar — that Fox and MSNBC are just obverse and reverse on the same coin.
