Rupert Murdoch is a man of many contradictions. Last year he stirred up no small amount of discussion in Australia after his Boyer Lecture to the ABC lambasted - in no uncertain terms - the state of education in Australia. If we cannot produce a new generation of innovative, driven and highly educated thinkers, his thesis ran, then surely we will be relegated to the backburner by the emerging economies of China and India. A compelling idea. Yet it's hard to escape the fact that this is a man, the majority of whose news empire has been devoted to fostering quite catastrophic levels of ignorance in the general population. Page three tits in Britain? Check. Married with Children? Check. Fox News? Oh my GOD, check.

Nonetheless, it is the latter of these to which we turn our attention today, because Fox News has recently succeeded in putting itself into the glare of the mainstream news cycle once more, although this time through no fault of its own. For those of you who don't follow the ups and (largely) downs of the beast with as much masochistic rigour as myself, the Fox News network is basically the primary televisual organ of the News Limited empire/US Republican party. For the last 13 years Fox News has been a self-sufficient cable channel, reporting on the happenings of the world under the motto "Fair and Balanced". Except, well, calling Fox News "Fair and Balanced" is kinda like calling Chernobyl a "wacky mishap". Even if it was sarcastic it would still be inappropriate.

If you've never sat yourself down in front of a Fox News broadcast before, I can highly recommend indulging in the experience, even if merely for morbid curiosity's sake. I can remember first realising something was afoot when I watched three minutes of a broadcast back in 2003, just as the Iraq War was kicking off, and seeing a retired Army General move pieces of infantry across a TV display with a white pen, like a warmongering Richie Benaud, while repeatedly referring to the Iraqi's as "the bad guys". Mmm. Nuanced. But a mere tendency towards politics on the extreme, nutbar right of the spectrum notwithstanding, it's the mode of delivery that really sets the Fox News network apart from the other high-fliers in the reactionary media spectrum. Witness here, Fox News' current poster boy, Glenn Beck, attempting to spell the word 'oligarchy'. In pursuit of... something:



Ah. I see. To an outside observer it seems quite remarkable that any human could withstand more than a few minutes of this histrionic hatefest, but Fox News has been the top ranking news channel in the US for quite a number of years. Which probably says something quite profound about America's obsession with demagoguery, but that's a whole different story.

But having a rather popular yet vitriolically Conservative news station about is obviously somewhat of a headache for a Presidential regime as purportedly progressive as that helmed by Barack Obama. They have... not been kind to him. You know those Mad Hatter-esque "tea parties" that were so popular across the northern summer and almost single-handedly derailed health care reform in the US? Yeah, Fox News.

And so, a few weeks back, the White House decided to strike back, sending their Communications Director, Anita Dunn, out to chastise the network for essentially functioning as the unofficial mouthpiece for the less fashionable elements of the Republican Party i.e. the idiots i.e. the Palin voters. And, with that, it was on. Except it wasn't really. Because quite rapidly the White House discovered that general standards of political PR meant that you can't actually come out and bad mouth, well, anyone really. Even saying what everybody already knew, namely that Fox News was to impartiality as Chernobyl was to the Marx Brothers, was tantamount to declaring war on the freedom of speech. And you better believe Fox News had a field day with it too. Round the clock, dawn til dawn again, the station was heavy with accusations that the Obama administration was Fascist, Stalin-esque, Communist, etc. Not a good look.

But in the end this was, in all likelihood, a zero sum game. The White House may have lost, but the only people it lost to were the lunatic fringe that they were never going to win anyway. And Fox News may have won, but its demographics ensure that their smarmy triumphalism wasn't liable to really spread beyond the lunatic fringe that they already owned. And so, despite its general air of representing a somewhat entertaining battle for the heart of the Fourth Estate, the whole affair ended up being little more than re-confirmation of the presence of certain unpalatable and irreconcilable schisms in the American polity. It is, as it turns out, kinda tough to give 300 million-odd people the right to free speech and expect them all to get along. But I guess that's the beauty of America, really.

And just because he'll do it better than I could ever dream of, here's Jon Stewart taking on this selfsame issue. The title: Fox? It's Not Even Close To News!

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