Fox News: Fair and Balanced? We Report. You Decide.

Abstract

The Fox News Channel has been claiming for more than a decade that their news channel is fair and balanced. To test this claim a statistical analysis was done on 32 partial transcripts of the Hannity and Colmes Shows posted on the internet with dates from February 16, 2003 to January 7, 2009. Results indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between the average number of words Sean Hannity spoke (397) and the average number of words Alan Colmes spoke (284) on the 32 partial transcripts. Hannity spoke more words than Colmes on 21 of the 32 partial transcripts and this observed frequency approached statistical significance. Based on the data collected from February 16, 2003 to January 7, 2009 the findings suggest that the Hannity and Colmes Show is not fair and balanced and that, by inference, perhaps neither may the Fox News Channel be fair and balanced. The methodology used in this study can be used to analyze a different set of data.

Keywords: Media Bias, Fox News, Unfair, Unbalanced, Journalism, Communication