This emerging battle should be fun to watch.  Rupert Murdoch’s son in law Matthew Freud launched an on the record  broadside against Roger Ailes and Fox News for the “horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.”  See link.  As the article notes, this follows reports (which were denied) over the summer that Murdoch Sr. was himself sometimes embarrassed by the content of Fox News.

Similar questions regarding the journalistic standards of Fox News have been raised by many commentators, the Obama administration and this blog.  See here, here and here.  But the ugly reality is that Mammon is king.  The market wants the tabloid-like opinion driven “news” peddled by Fox which financially is comfortably beating all its other rivals.  Mr. Alies is safe on his perch as the propaganda arm for anti-Democratic Party and anti-Obama political forces for the foreseeable future.  See another opinion on the matter here.

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John McCain’s campaign manager comes out swinging on Sarah Palin’s issues with the truth.  This Sunday’s 60 Minutes could be entertaining.  Also read about previously disclosed emails regarding the Alaska Independence Party.  Alaska blog Mudflats has a great read of just how Palin could make stuff up with a straight face.  See link.

For the last 15 years or so the mainstream media has generally been awful in calling out politicians on their bullshit, acting as stenographers reporting stuff verbatim.  Fox News (when they are not making stuff up) is an extreme example of this when it comes to the Republican Party.

With the media not doing their job emboldened politicians up the ante. This was evident the last couple of weeks when Republicans (including Mr. 9/11 himself) started peddling the fiction that no domestic terror attacks occurred George Bush.  At least this time the media did step up.  See link.

Andrew Sullivan has compiled a fairly thorough list of Palin’s odd and often easily disprovable lies since she hit the national stage.  It is hard not to lose respect for John McCain for trying to position a truth averse clueless neophyte a 71 year old cancer survivor’s heartbeat away from the presidency.

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Britt Hume reacted to criticism for his pompous proselytizing on Fox News (see previous blog post here) by playing the victim card and making the tiresome accusation that this is part of the war against Christianity.  Most of this stems from a grouse that the law and the Constitution require equal treatment of Christianity with other faiths (Oh the horror!!!) with little grounding in fact.  Ask Congressman Keith Ellson who was savaged by parts of the right for having the temerity to take his oath of office on the book of his faith – the Quran.

I will outsource the  further exposure of Britt Hume’s ridiculousness to the satirist most often linked on this blog:

From January 4, 2010:

Follow up from From January 5, 2010:

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Jon Stewart catches Sean Hannity using footage of another rally to make the Bachmann intimidation rally seem bigger.

Of course this is not the first time Stewart has had fun at the expense of Fox News. See here.  This is also not the first time Fox has spliced video feeds, though they did apologize in that instance.

To be fair to the employees of Fox News, not everybody parrots the company line.  From earlier this summer watch as the Fox News anchor (who does not appear to be one of their opinion talking heads), desperately tries to bring Liz Trotta back on the liberal media bashing meme he was trying to create.  Instead she eviscerates Sarah Palin’s credentials and gets rapidly cut off as she mentions this Vanity Fair article.

Then an honorable mention to Shepard Smith who does try to live up to the Fox news motto.

Rupert Murdoch is continuing to fire away at Google.  So far it is all talk and no action.  The media baron is stymied by the change brought about by the internet that had upended journalism’s traditional revenue model.  It is hard to see him actually take Fox News off search engine sites that drive traffic to his websites.  Others like Mark Cuban think he may be on to something.  The problem is that many newspapers like the New York times have tried and failed to get subscribers to pay for content.  The Wall Street Journal with its unique business following is one of the only “old media” outlets to succeed with this model.  I tend to agree with Matt Ingram, a link to a site that requires subscription or worse payment is likely to send me scurrying in search of alternative news sources.

Previously posted on the administration calling out Fox.  Its been amazing to see the mainstream media rally to Fox’s defense and pretend that what the Obama administration is doing something new…except that the Bush administration did the same thing to MSNBC this last year.  But the reason for this post is the absolutely brilliant, must see video from Jon Stewart skewering Fox.  Enjoy!

The “Main Stream Media” has disapprovingly noted the Obama administration calling out Fox News as the media arm of the Republican party.  See here, here, here, here and here.  Not unexpectedly Fox News howled in outrage and liberal blogs cheerfully detailed the hypocrisy of Fox’s complaints when it cheered on the Bush administration calling out NBC News and MSNBC.  Very few media members noted that the underlying charge that Fox News is “opinion journalism masquerading as news” is essentially true.

A couple of good reads from the Economist’s Democracy in America blog today comparing Fox News to what is happening in Russia, Italy and Thailand, and Slate’s Jonathan Weisberg noting that the Fox response to the administration shows the inherent bias in its coverage.

I agree with the final point in both articles.  Cable “news” is now unwatchable.  Opinion shows dominate the peak hours and off-peak hours are filled with a bunch of documentary shows.  Even CNN Headline News which a decade ago provided 24 News coverage is now filled with shows that masquerade as news.  The Internet would be a refuge for finding news, but alas even the AP has decided to muddy its role as a wire service by falling for the opinion journalism lure.

More than ever, developing a filter to separate the wheat of news from the chaff of opinion is essential.  Paraphrasing the legal principle of caveat emptor, let the  unwary news reader beware.