I average maybe 30 minutes a year of watching Fox News, and I didn’t notice firsthand their bias from that. Until today, when I watched for about 15 minutes.
The first thing I noticed was that the news jumped from segment to segment rapidly. It probably covered 5 or 6 segments in that 15 minutes. I didn’t learn much from the news… all I was was “informed”. All news no interpretation.
An expert came on, he talked to the anchor. The anchor was very aggressive, skeptical, and almost cynical, certainly compared to what I remember when I more regularly watched network news in the '80s and '90s. The expert played along completely, expressing no surprise or annoyance. The interesting thing here is that there was no conflict of the anchor based on the words of the expert. Its as if the anchor had something he wanted to say and he treated the other’s words as if they were a means to that end. The rhythm of the two was unbroken, almost allowing a trancelike state.
Near the bottom of the screen displayed what they called “Fox Facts”. They didn’t look like the sort of thing I consider facts.
The anchor talked quickly, very quickly. It went along with the rapid-fire pacing of the show in general. I noticed it was difficult to follow the exact meaning of what he was saying, but the tone was consistent.
Used interchangeably were “terrorists” and “insurgents”, a couple times they said that the US military had killed 600 terrorists recently in Iraq (in Fallujah probably), and it was unclear whether that simply meant 600 insurgents.
Several other rightist remarks were made by the anchor. I don’t remember any of them clearly, they were lost in the ADD style.
One thing is for sure: This anchor acted a lot more like Bill O’Reilly than he did Tom Brokaw.