User:AlexRUofT/Sandbox

The Foxification of North American Media
The Fox News Effect (also known as the 'Foxification of News") describes the effect of the News Corporation's Fox News Channel on print and broadcast media. The term was first explicitly used in an article in the New York Times by Jim Rutenberg, which argued that cable news coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq indicated that the Fox News Channel had a significant impact on how these broadcast media covered large scale events. This type of coverage includes such as explicitly partisan discourse, appeals to patriotism, the blending of news and opinion and the use of hyperbolic claims. Although News Corporation President and CEO Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes have maintained that there is no bias in Fox News' coverage (Fox News often advertises itself as "Fair and Balanced") there have been accusations of bias from media watchdog groups, progressive websites such as Media Matters, MoveOn.Org, and FAIR, and a number of journalists. Also, it has been argued that Fox News has had a significant political impact within the United States. Fox News Channel has not only had a significant impact on media in the United States, but also in Canada with the creation of the Sun News Network. The Sun News Network (colloquially called "Sun TV") has a similar format to the Fox News Channel and uses the same themes. Criticisms of the creation of Sun News focused on concerns that it would be a "Fox News North" and how it could negatively impact political discourse in Canada. Fox News and Sun News can be seen as manifestations of Richard Hoftstadter's paranoid style — a style of political discourse which makes appeals to a target audience through supposed access to privileged information, a conspiratorial view of history, and a perceived threat to a way of life by external and internal forces plotting to destroy it. Hoftstatder maintained that the paranoid style often remained on the fringes and was only cyclical in history. However, the introduction of Fox News Channel in 1996 has brought this style to the fore in both broadcast and print news. Fox News has mainstreamed the use of a paranoid style in North American media.