Prominent television journalist Margie Reedy visited Tufts yesterday to present her documentary film "Cable News Goes to War," which she recently wrote and produced.
The main focus of the documentary was on the popularity of Fox News despite the fact that Fox is often considered the least objective of the major networks.
The documentary consists of footage from CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News during the main phases of the war in Iraq, and contains interviews with journalists with their take on news presentation and its bias.
The film suggests that because the media is skeptical of the government and because the public finds leftist activists more critical of government policies than conservatives, the media is viewed as liberal. Thus, Fox's popularity is due to the fact that they offer an alternative to the standard treatment of news in their support for the government.
"They've taken the right and called it normal," Director of the Shorenstein Center Alex Jones said in an interview in the film.
According to Jones, the majority of news media outlets are politically neutral while Fox has strayed from this norm.
Bill O'Reilly, host of the popular Fox program "The O'Reilly Factor," agrees on the source of his network's success. In an interview in Reedy's documentary, O'Reilly said that other networks "don't have the people, they don't have the [right-leaning] point of view."
After the screening, Reedy gave a small speech further emphasizing her belief that objectivity is the most important characteristic of journalism.
She referred to the news at Fox and others like it as "advocacy journalism," and that this trend, "could not only take down objectivity, it could harm democracy in the process."
Reedy said that Fox is "good at what they do," and that commentators like Bill O'Reilly are "watchable" and often "compelling."
However, she believes that their popularity often stems from people being "more interested in entertainment than news."
Reedy intended to make sure that
students understood the idea of the "supermarket of news" that exists in today's world, especially considering the proliferation of online news sources.
"You know when you talk to people that their basic perception of the world affects their opinion, it's the same with news outlets," Reedy said. She emphasized the need for media consumers to think for themselves.
One student posed a question about editing techniques, which allowed Reedy to illustrate her point. "You [the editor] can make it be whatever you want it to be," Reedy said. She referred to documentary films, acknowledging the difficulty of maintaining objectivity.
Reedy discussed the increasing polarization of American politics and its effect on the media. Reedy said that political campaigns have become significantly more contentious over the course of her career as a journalist and that she believes this has much to do with growing media bias. She noted it has "turned people off to American politics."
Reedy has been a television news anchor for the past 25 years, most recently hosting an hour-long news interview show for New England Cable News (NECN) called "NewsNight."
She produced the documentary in 2003 during her time as a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Professor Roberta Oster Sachs has been an acquaintance of Reedy since they met at the Kennedy School of Government. "Reedy's lecture was a great opportunity ... to learn how to analyze a news broadcast with a critical eye and to discern the difference between news and hype," Oster Sachs said.
"I believe it is important for students to be exposed to working professionals who struggle every day to get the news on the air and Reedy is a great role model for Tufts students," she said.
The event was held in the Rabb Room in the Lincoln-Filene Center. The majority of students in attendance were from Sachs' class "Producing Films for Social Change." After the documentary, Reedy answered questions from the 16 students in the class.
