Rhetoric of Fox News
Over the years, Fox News has gained the reputation of being a conservative news source. To get a better understanding of the audience Fox News is targeting and how this affects the public sphere, we will look at the issue public of FoxNews.com and analyze its position. After running an Issue Crawler on the Fox News website, we are able to get a clearer picture as to what the linkage of the site is as well as the site’s approach towards rhetorical devices such as ethos and the public sphere. Another important aspect to examine will be the general view from the public in regards to FoxNews.com. In order to do this, a survey was collected from participants to see how other people view the news website. With the survey, the goal was to view people’s opinion on the layout and content of the site based on their political preferences. By examining these elements, we will be able to see the approach FoxNews.com takes towards constructing their site to be targeting a conservative public and also show a preference on the design of news sites by the general public.
Taking a look at the network the Issue Crawler produced for FoxNews.com, we can immediately see that the densest clump and largest nodes of websites are all affiliated with Fox News. The majority of the sites within this cluster are actual web pages that are linked inside FoxNews.com. With this being the case, it appears that Fox News doesn’t have many links outside of its own organization. We can see a specific example of Fox News doing this by looking at an article posted by Fox News’s affiliated site Fox News Insider. In an article titled Dem Who Called SEAL Widow an ‘Idiot’ Fired After Letter from Retired SEAL, we can see that the linked sources within the article are all from other Fox News articles. This type of linking back to itself on articles makes much more sense of why the cluster returned the results that it did. Furthermore, if we take a closer look at the individual links shown in the cluster, we can get a better understanding of what kind of content Fox News is producing and who they are aiming the content towards. While looking through these individual sites, the one site that stood out to me the most was FoxNewsInsider.com. What surprised me the most about this site was how blatantly conservative it was with its content. With FoxNews.com it seemed as though there was still a sort of masking of the news outlet’s conservative undertones by trying to appear somewhat neutral. But with FoxNewsInsider.com, there is no hiding by this site that this is a news source for conservative viewers. The two top stories on Fox News Insider showcase headlines that read “Conway: We’re Seeing Democratic Party ‘Unravel in Front of Our Eyes’” and “Gold Star Wife Salutes Trump’s Unannounced Visit to Honor Fallen Navy Seal”. While FoxNews.com, although still has conservative favoritism, is a little tamer with their headlines such as the one that reads “White House defends Sessions as Dems seek resignation over Russia revelation.” With these kinds of headlines we can see that the imagined audience for Fox News Insider are conservative users. Imagined audiences are the target audience someone has in mind when creating a piece of digital rhetoric (Baym & Boyd 2012). Now that we have a good understanding of what the target audience of these sites are, we can look into the digital rhetoric produced by FoxNews.com.
When viewing FoxNews.com and other sites in its network, we can see several issues with the digital rhetoric that is being produced from these websites. While the internet has certainly made accessing information such as the news easier, we can run into a problem with ethos when evaluating digital rhetoric. Ethos allows for us to examine the “authorship or expertise” (Eyman 2015) in web based media. What makes this difficult with a news site like Fox News is that because so much of the content is emotionally charged as we see with the headlines from Fox News Insider earlier, conservative users cling to those headlines without searching for credibility among the content. This leads to another issue in regards to ethos of FoxNews.com and the network produced by the Issue Crawler. Looking at the crawl we see that there weren’t really any other news outlets outside of Fox News that were linked to its web pages. This is showing that the content being produced by Fox News is not being supported by other news outlets which could also show that Fox News is relying on more heavily opinionated content than credible. This becomes more evident when running a separate issue crawl on another popular news site such as MSNBC.com. From the crawl done on MSNBC, we can see that many other news sites such as the Huffington Post and CNN are linking to MSNBC giving its content much more credibility. By MSNBC linking to other news sources in their articles, the content then leans much more towards credible and accurate rather than the opinion of a journalist citing only their organization or no one at all.
As we see the issues mentioned from ethos, there is also an issue with the public sphere when looking at FoxNews.com. The public sphere is described as “an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action” (The public sphere 2015). With FoxNews.com and the other sites in its affiliated network, individuals are able to come together to freely discuss problems but those problems seem to be required to have a conservative lens put on them by the journalist for Fox News. By being heavily conservative in the opinions being produced by the site, there is not much hope for someone visiting the site to discuss anything with a pro liberal viewpoint. People should be able to come to a news site and discuss their opinions to enrich others who may not agree with you or share another opinion. The damage to the public sphere that we see in this case is a result from something called fragmentation. The examples of fragmentation we see in the virtual spaces are a result of the diversity found on internet. While the internet has certainly allowed for our views and opinions to reach far more people than ever before, we see more instances of groups coming together online that share only one view or opinion making the internet more fragmented. Since the people in these fragmented groups are only discussion a topic that everyone is in agreement with, it only strengthens their already held beliefs instead of challenging them (Papacharissi 2002). We are seeing examples of this fragmentation with FoxNews.com as people with conservative views come to the site to consume news that will reaffirm their view points.
Shifting focus to how Fox News is perceived by others, we will look at a survey I conducted which asked participants about their reaction to FoxNews.com. With the survey, I mainly wanted to view people’s opinion on the layout and content of the site based on their political preferences. To do this I asked a series of questions which included how enjoyable viewers found the design and content of FoxNews.com as well as how left or right they fell on the political spectrum. Another question I was eager to look at how people answered was whether the participants preferred the design of FoxNews.com or MSNBC.com. I chose a website like MSNBC because of its reputation for being more liberal with its content and also because the design of their site is much more modern compared to FoxNews.com. Through the answers I gathered from the survey, I was able to get a better understanding of how a site like FoxNews.com is generally received and what viewers think of the design of the website. Based on the results, it is becoming clearer that there seems to be a general layout people tend to prefer in the news website. At first, the assumption towards the design of the site was that the simpler layout of FoxNews.com would fit well with conservative users. However, the results of the survey leaned more towards people liking the simpler look in general regardless of political preference. Taking a closer look at the results will not only prove this point on the design of news sites but also confirm some previously perceived notions of the political biases surrounding FoxNews.com.
From the survey, there were several surprises I found from the results. I asked participants to rate how conservative or liberal they considered themselves to be with 1 being liberal and 5 being conservative. When creating the survey, I had anticipated that the majority of the responded would consider themselves to be more liberal on the political spectrum which turned out to be true. I had also hypothesized while creating the survey that those who considered themselves to be more liberal voters would not find the design of FoxNews.com enjoyable. This turned out to be diverse among the participants. Most people found the design less enjoyable but tended to be indifferent about the design. What I found really surprising about the two participants who rated the design of FoxNews.com as enjoyable also rated themselves as more liberal. This to me indicates that the structure of a site can still come off as appealing visually regardless of the content on the site. These two participants also chose that they prefer the design of FoxNews.com over MSNBC.com within the survey which further added to my surprise. However, these two participants were not alone in preferring the design of Foxnews.com over MSNBC.com. Out of all that participants, there were only three that chose MSNBC as the preferred layout. Looking into this further, I noticed that on the last question of the survey where I ask the participants to add their preferred news website, a significant amount answered that they used CNN.com as their website of choice. After navigating to CNN.com to see how their website is laid out, I noticed that the layout was very similar to FoxNews.com. Both websites for CNN and Fox News have their layouts designed in a way that resemble a traditional newspaper. This kind of layout seems to be pleasing to many users of news websites as shown in the survey results. While Fox News tries to be more conservative and MSNBC tries to be more liberal, it’s interesting to note that CNN actually makes an attempt to stay neutral in political space. Because CNN and Fox News are designed so similarly, it made me question whether the choice by the participants of preferring the design of Fox News over MSNBC was due to the familiarity they might have felt while examining FoxNews.com. Whether the choice was due to familiarity or not, it seems as though some news sites are similarly designing their websites on purpose. In rhetoric, this is known as imitation which involves copying some aspects from one another but adding a new form or content to make it your own (Burton 2007). This seems to be very present in the designs of CNN and Fox News as they appear very similar at first glance but yet have subtle differences when looked upon closely. By examining how closely related these two sites are, we can get a better understanding of the trends news sites seem to share. Based on the appeal the survey participants had towards the design of FoxNews.com and the majority of the participants preferring CNN.com as their news source, I decided to create a mock news website with similar design principles to these websites. In my mock news site, I focused on having the design be more text based with only certain images showing up for the top story and other subsequent larger stories. This seems to fit in with how the layout of newspapers are designed and there could be a connection between how that “old fashioned” layout has now transitioned to an online format with websites. |
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After analyzing the results on the design of FoxNews.com from the participants, there was one question on the survey that almost everyone was unanimous on which was the content of FoxNews.com. Most participants found the content of FoxNews.com to not be enjoyable. There were some that voted indifferent about the content but the majority was still negative towards the content. This fits the narrative very well that the content of FoxNews.com is aimed at conservative viewers. With those who identify themselves as liberal staying away from FoxNews.com because of its content, Fox News can then project its content towards more conservative viewers. By Fox News using this information to direct its content towards conservative viewers it is acting on something know as Kairos. The term Kairos in rhetoric is used to describe an author who considers their audience based on their context and uses this opportunity to project their message (Burton 2007). Fox News sees the opportunity they have with their conservative audience and portrays their conservative bias in articles and video segments on their website. We see examples of these opportune moments with the headlines Fox News Insider choses when a news article has any political significance using this to talk down to people with liberal views. What Fox News is doing also fits in the concept of decorum which involves a subject matter fitting into a desired circumstance which in this case would be conservative viewers (Burton 2007).
From the survey, we are able to get a better understanding what viewers enjoy more in the design of their preferred news site as well as confirm the general political background of the users of FoxNews.com. Fox News’ reputation has allowed for users to accept credibility on sources reported on by the news site without question and the fragmentation occurring on the news outlets’ website does not allow for diverse exposure towards viewpoints. Through our findings we are able to see that Fox News has clear biases towards a conservative audience and that the opinions shared by the news organization are not being supported by other news outlets. Through the survey, we can see that although the design of FoxNews.com might seem “old fashioned” with its layout resembling a newspaper, people seem to prefer a more simplistic, text based, layout like Fox News is portraying online than a more modern, image based, layout such as MSNBC.com. One thing is for certain however. No matter the layout, the content of the site is very much dependent on which site an audience prefers. Because of this, Fox News is able to cater its website with certain biases as they know those who agree with those biases will visit their site. With our analysis, we are able to see how Fox News’ biases affect its overall connected network.
Sources
Baym, N. & Boyd, D. (2012). Social mediated publicness: An introduction. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 56(3), 320-329.
Burton, Gideon O. 2007 "The Forest of Rhetoric." Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric. February 26, 2007. Accessed February 23, 2017. http://rhetoric.byu.edu/.
Eyman, D. (2015). Defining and locating digital rhetoric. In Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice. University of Michigan Press, 12-60.
Papacharissi, Z. (2002). The virtual sphere The internet as a public sphere. New Media & Society, 4(1),9-27.
“The public sphere.” (2015). Wikipedia.
Baym, N. & Boyd, D. (2012). Social mediated publicness: An introduction. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 56(3), 320-329.
Burton, Gideon O. 2007 "The Forest of Rhetoric." Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric. February 26, 2007. Accessed February 23, 2017. http://rhetoric.byu.edu/.
Eyman, D. (2015). Defining and locating digital rhetoric. In Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice. University of Michigan Press, 12-60.
Papacharissi, Z. (2002). The virtual sphere The internet as a public sphere. New Media & Society, 4(1),9-27.
“The public sphere.” (2015). Wikipedia.