NEWSWEEK:

The O'Garbage Factor

Fox News isn't just bad. It's un-American.

This should be suhweet-uh, huh?

Last week, when White House Communications Director Anita Dunn charged the Fox News Channel with right-wing bias (four months after a written statement and televised speech .. subsequently pointed out as fact by Fox in which she named Mao as one her two fave philosophers - Epa) , Fox responded the way it always does. It denied the accusation with a straight face while proceeding to confirm it with its coverage.

Consider Fox's Web story on the episode. It quotes five people (besides Dunn who refused any interview - Epa). Two of them work for Fox. All of them assert that administration officials are either wrong in substance or politically foolish to criticize the network. No one is cited supporting Dunn's criticisms or saying that it could make sense for Obama to challenge the network's power. It's a textbook example of a biased journalism.

Uh, exsqueeze me Uh, yah . Uh, hmmm.

Any news organization that took its responsibilities seriously would take pains to cover presidential criticism fairly. It would regard doing so as itself a test of integrity. At Fox, by contrast, complaints of unfairness prompt only hoots of derision and demands for "evidence" that, when presented, is brushed off and ignored.

Uh, you bet.

Rather than in any way maturing, Fox has in recent months become more boisterous and demagogic. Fox sponsored as much as it covered the anti-Obama "tea parties" this summer. Its "fact checking" about the president's health-care proposal is provided by Karl Rove. And weepy Glenn Beck has begun to exhibit a Strangelovean concern about government invading our bloodstream by vaccinating people for swine flu. With this misinformation campaign, Fox stands to become the first network to actively try to kill its viewers.

That Rupert Murdoch may tilt the news rightward more for commercial than ideological reasons is beside the point. What matters is the way that Fox's model has invaded the bloodstream of the American media. By showing that ideologically distorted news can drive ratings, Ailes has provoked his rivals at CNN and MSNBC to develop a variety of populist and ideological takes on the news. In this way, Fox hasn't just corrupted its own coverage. Its example has made all of cable news unpleasant and unreliable.

Why do I keep thinking of the words cart and horse? Or seeing the statements of Walter Cronkite, who was trusted as an arbiter and neutral reporter of objective reality?

Why do I think of what was said and done over the previous 8 years when another ox was being gored, and no such discussion by the Bush admin was fired off?

Whether the White House engages with Fox is a tactical political question

In fact, nothing could be MORE REVELATORY of innate bias by Weisberg himself than this line. Had George Bush, Tony Snow, Ari Fleischer, Karl Rove, and god forbid, Dick Cheney better known in such circles as Sauron, got into a face to face with MSNBC and CNN, and NBCCBSABC as enemies of the admin, and authors of bias and refused to interview with them, Weisberg I ASSURE you, would have been among the first to whip out the Nixon enemies list comparisons.

There is no doubt that a war is going on. A war in which there will be no academic or political prisoners, and no center left alive as friends, companions or respected co-workers, certainly by the left who see them not only as rightists, but as spineless cowards, unresisting to those leaning towards fascism.

Unfortunately for Weisberg, he doesn't explain why Beck was the one to reveal the hard news about Acorn, or point out the comments of Cass Sunstein, Anita Dunn, Mark Lloyd and Van Jones, and not that paragon of neutral reportage, Rachel Maddow. Nor can he help putting on display his rampantly irresponsible questioning of patriotism at Fox, in part by blaming them for Andersen-Cooper's UNBELIEVABLE 'tea bagging' mind.

People like Weisberg will make it easy for the center to decide between socialism and conservatism even as they try to blur what the Founders had in mind.