Is Fox News "Fair and Balanced"

According to some data from the Pew Research Center, maybe they are.

If you look at the center chart "Tone of Coverage", (shown below)

you can see that Fox News treated McCain and Obama equally: 40% of stories for both were "unfavorable", 40% for both were "neutral" and 20% for both were "favorable".  If we define the rooting for factor", RFF, as favorable/unfavorable, Both Obama and McCain had a RFF of 20%/40% = 0.5.  If we define "Obama Bias" as RFF(Obama)/RFF(McCain), they get a bias of 1.0, which is dead-even fair.  Fox treated each equally.

This suggests that the other main stream media outlets, which fall to the left of Fox, are biased.  The chart shows this.  MSNBC is particularly non-objective.  Their RFF(Obama) is about 40/13 (or 3), the RFF(McCain) is about 10/70, yielding a "Obama Bias"of 21.

Pew collected similar data on NBC.  They do better than MSNBC, but that ain't saying much.   Their RFF(Obama) is 2.0, RFF(McCain) is 1/3, for a "Obama Bias" of 6.

I'm surprised that Fox was "Fair and Balanced".  But the real conclusion of this data is that the other media outlets are truly biased, far more than I was expecting.  Pew speculates that not all of this effect is bias, some is a "bandwagon" or "horserace" effect favoring the leader in the polls, but I don't see that as much of an improvement either.  Maybe they can read journalist's minds and intentions.  I prefer to stick with the objective facts.