Fox News Watch
I’m reading through a recent issue of The Nation, and there it is… an advertisement for the Fox News Channel.
It’s not the first time Fox News has placed an ad in the magazine, to the laughter of the magazines liberal-left clientele. I can’t figure out what the game Fox News is playing here.
The ad? The ratings for Fox News’s coverage of the Democratic Primary has beaten the ratings for CNN’s coverage. Handy bar graphs. The debates that Fox News showed beat the debates that CNN showed. The ratings for the night of Iowa’s caucusses defeated the ratings for CNN’s coverage. Like that.
Perplexing, though, was the significance of a quote from a Boston Herald story found here, “He said he learned from Fox News that he was the likely winner, and celebrated with supporters and advisers like Senator Edward M. Kennedy, manager Mary Beth Cahill (another Dorchester native), strategist Robert Shrum, and Kerry’s brother Cam.”
What is the reader of the Nation supposed to do with this quote? “John Kerry finds Fox News credible (or something, and there’s a mention of Edward Kennedy’s name, so we should too!”
I flicked past Fox News the other day, and spotted Oliver North talking with Alan Colmes. On the bottom of the screen, there was the “Fox Factoid”: Oliver North was awarded 2 purple hearts. Uh huh. Might not have been the “factoid” that I would’ve selected, (mine would probably have been culled from herebut to each their own.
All I caught was Oliver North saying “It’s typical John Kerry. He’s sliming the National Guard.” (uh… huh. So the National Guard of the Vietnam era was, to paraphrase Colin Powell, a place where the sons of the powerful could wrangle themslves to avoid actual fighting, and has become since then, probably since “Operation Just Cause”, a deployable military arm much to the surprise of some of its recruits who were expecting just to throw out a couple weeks a month for college money… slime that if you must.)
Fox News. Fair and Balanced.