Fair and Balanced

On this Super Thursday after Super Tuesday, the Fox News institutional support for recently departed candidate Mitt Romney stands out starkly. The opinions of the majority of the commentators of the right leaning persuasion were slanted toward Romney, which is fine within that context, but the spillover of pro-Romney sentiment into the news reporting reflected poorly on Fox's claim to the mantle of being "fair and balanced". Monday and Tuesday reporting made continued references to a "Romney surge" in Georgia and California based on Rasmussen and Zogby polling. What made this situation appear to be journalistically egregious cherry picking of poll results serving to encourage the Romney faithful is that a quick review of all the polls at RealClearPolitics would have revealed that the pollsters were all over the map in their projections. The failure of the phantom surge to materialize suggests that Fox should expand the "No-Spin Zone" to include the newsroom. Some Fox commentators rightly decry the undisguised left-leaning bias of the NBC family of stations. A little leadership by example would be appropriate.

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