It seems that Fox News has no loyalty to anyone or anything when it comes to showing off for their viewers.
Fox News posted an interesting article on Thursday titled: “New survey shows Fox News more trusted than MSNBC, CNN.”
The interesting part is that they unnecessarily threw Trump completely under the bus in an effort to prove that the survey offered a credible analysis in ranking Fox News higher than MSNBC and CNN.
Here’s what happened. As Fox News reported:
Fox News was ranked the “most trusted” American TV news brand in the United States, and was second overall, behind only the British-based BBC, according to a new study. The Research Intelligencer study, conducted via Brand Keys, analyzed 4,012 viewers who rated both broadcast and cable news organizations that they watch at least three times per week to determine how those brands resonated from a trust standpoint. [emphasis added]
Below are the media rankings as reported by Fox News, AL.com, and MediaPost:
- British based BBC – 90 percent
- Fox News – 87 percent
- PBS – 86 percent
- Bloomberg – 81 percent
- MSNBC – 80 percent
- CBS – 72 percent
- NBC – 70 percent
- ABC – 69 percent
- CNN – 69 percent
- Sinclair – 58 percent
In an effort to lend legitimacy to the study, Fox News quoted DePauw University professor and media analyst, Jeffrey McCall, who told the network that the study was a fair indication of how viewers feel about news organizations.
“A key to this study is that it assesses viewers who watch a channel three-plus times a week. Thus, unlike some studies, it gets input from people who actually watch and know something about the channel they are rating,” McCall told Fox News, adding “Some studies of media credibility have respondents assessing channels they don’t watch and of which they have little real experience.”
Fox News then proceeded to throw Trump under the bus. They admitted that Trump came in last place in the poll in an effort to lend further legitimacy to the study.
As Fox News implied, their high ranking was not the result of the results being skewed by Brand Keys aiming the study at Trump supporters:
The study also included Trump as a “brand,” and just 29 percent of participants deemed the commander in chief trustworthy. The dismal percentage on the trust meter for Trump indicates the survey was not aimed at the president’s supporters, who would presumably prefer Fox News over liberal networks such as MSNBC and CNN.
Here’s the thing: the study itself was conducted to see how Trump stacked up with mainstream media and not to see which network ended up at the top of the heap.
As Robert Passikoff, the founder and president of Brand Keys Inc., reported:
As President Trump has assailed news (of all varieties) as “Fake News,” and more recently, “the enemy of the people,” Brand Keys was interested to see how much “trust” viewers actually had in the President, versus the TVs brands.
Continuing, Passikoff reported on the findings of the study as it related to Trump, noting that his ranking among Republicans came in 23 percentage points below that of the lowest TV network:
Trump was rated with an overall 29%, less than a third of that attributed to the BBC, and half that of local news broadcaster and avowed Trump supporter, Sinclair Broadcast Group.
Examined by political affiliation, Democrats rated Mr. Trump 14%, Independents 22%, and Republicans 35%. Eighteen percent (18%) of the sample had “No Opinion.”
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