And what about this line?

"The jury is still out on blogs," he added. "Just as many people distrust them as trust them."

The most depressing table in the report for me was the response to "Which network is your primary source of news?":

Two or more networks........30%
Fox.........................................18
CNN.......................................16
NBC.......................................14
ABC.......................................11
CBS..........................................9
PBS-NPR.................................3

One of the things which I feel stands between Australians and a descent into a US-style neo-con dictatorship is the strength of our major public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, as a respected public institution.  The ABC is not only respected as an accurate and independent source of information, but it is also used by a substantial proportion of the population.

I suspect Britons would say something similar about the Beeb.

musings of a bureaucrat

So what on earth does fair and balanced mean? In the case of O'Reilly it means that his most common line spoken to liberals is "where am I going wrong". He always has expert liberal guests on who disagree with him, and then they debate. The saintly O'Reilly seems to understand that democracy is a debate, that people will trust you if are willing to acknowledge that there are two sides to every issue, you are willing to present the two sides, and then step up and debate the expert liberals on the particular about which they have expertise. You can't be more fair and balanced than that. Additionally, he is unafraid. The liberal perverts, for example, have bullied the country into believing that only they can compassionately understand pedophilia, and know how to handle it (usually with treatment and sometimes a short stay in jail) while O'Reilly will have none of it. He wants to protect kids from rapist by throwing recidivist rapists in jail. The liberals always seem to come off as, well, dumb perverts, while O'Reilly seems to come off as a passionate human being who cares about protecting kids; not rapists.

The other Fox prime time show is "Hannity and Colmes". Hannity is the Republican and Colmes is the Democrat who gets exactly equal time. Nothing more need to be said, except to the liberals who hate such fairness on the most visceral level because the know in their hearts it exposes their silly feelings as inadequate.

The Democrats lament the supposed consolidation of the media very loudly when what they really resent is that traditional Jeffersonian Republican views are no longer being treasonously hidden from them by the homogeneous MSLM. Democrats prefer the days when CBS's super liberal, Walter Cronkite, was the most trusted and the most listened to newsman in the world. He supported the Communists in Vietnam and was stone cold silent to the Pol Pot genocide that quickly followed the retreat he supported so self-assuredly. The liberals loved it when he used his trust to assure the then brainwashed American electorate that Barry Goldwater was not the preferred candidate. At CBS (the so called tiffany network) their idea of fair and balanced was to let liberals speak. The Cronkite legacy was handed over to Dan Rather who, in self-assured liberal haste, was quickly fired for trying to use forged documents, on election eve no less, to bring down a sitting Republican President.

The liberals loved it when the NY Times and Washington Post, with their staffs of overwhelmingly liberal reporters, set the entire nation's news agenda with their version of "objective" reporting. Their reporting was complimented by their editorial pages (always about 80% liberal) which told us how to interpret their already biased news stories. If ever their was an example of speaking truth to power it is Fox news. They have heroically exposed the MSLM for its complete lack of trustworthiness, if not outright treason. The saddest part of it is that you can't say the hijacking of truth and, effectively, democracy, was done out of conscious malice when it was actually done simply because liberals are not bright enough to understand the traditional Jeffersonian views on which Republican America was framed and grew to greatness.

Comments welcome at : bje1000@aol.com or
TheDumbDemocrat