The FAIR study

Just how biased was the media?

The FAIR study found just 3 percent of U.S. sources represented or expressed opposition to the war. With more than one in four U.S. citizens opposing the war and much higher rates of opposition in most countries where opinion was polled, none of the networks offered anything resembling proportionate coverage of anti-war voices. The anti-war percentages ranged from 4 percent at NBC, 3 percent at CNN, ABC, PBS and FOX, and less than 1 percent--one out of 205 U.S. sources--at CBS.

While the percentage of Americans opposing the war was about 10 times higher in the real world as they were on the nightly news (27 percent versus 3 percent), their proportion of the guestlist may still overstate the degree to which they were able to present their views on U.S. television. Guests with anti-war viewpoints were almost universally allowed one- sentence soundbites taken from interviews conducted on the street. Not a single show in the study conducted a sit-down interview with a person identified as being against the war.

Though Fox News Channel frequently engaged in overt cheerleading for the war and is on record as considering itself a pro-war news outlet (Baltimore Sun, 4/2/03), Fox's Special Report with Brit Hume had fewer U.S. officials than CBS (70 percent) and more U.S. anti-war guests (3 percent) than PBS or CBS. Eighty-one percent of Fox’s sources were pro-war, however, the highest of any network. CBS was close on the Murdoch network’s heels with 77 percent. NBC featured the lowest proportion of pro-war voices with 65 percent.

*The study was conducted using Nexis database transcripts. At publicatoin time, transcripts for six World News Tonight dates and two NewsHour dates were unavailable.