Battle of the Crazies
NBC Universal owns MSNBC and News Corp owns Fox News. At the moment both of those networks feature embarrassingly partisan prime time political coverage, they have dueling partisan asshole anchors - Olbermann for MSNBC and O’Reilly for Fox News - and they are both utterly convinced that their brand of reality is, in fact, truth. There is a key difference between the two networks, though. NBC Universal has the decency to be ashamed of MSNBC.
Murdoch’s News Corp shamelessly promotes the right-wing, theocratic bastion of neo-con loonies that inhabit Fox News and even does everything in its power to expand that particular brand of partisan tomfoolery (haven’t used that word in a while) to all of its other media outlets. They are shamelessly, gleefully Republican and they adore the conservative viewers who are throwing money hand over fist at them. They are so pathetically in the bag that they’ve traded staffers with the Bush administration. Tony Snow, may he rest in peace, jumped from Fox to Bush and Karl Rove just recently went the other way. Hell, Fox News is such a mindless drone of the administration that they probably get talking point faxes from the Oval Office every day. They are the closest thing that we have to state run media and they present the ultimate example of why that is a Very Bad Thing.
See, I don’t like Fox News at all. Neither do I like News Corp and its holdings. MSNBC, on the other hand… I liked that station. I really did, back in the far distant past. Watching MSNBC these past few years has been like watching a dear friend turn from a reasonable if impassioned scholar into a raving lunatic who’s living in a windowless room with walls covered in conspiratorial scribbles. Yes, it’s that bad.
The thing is, though, that NBC Universal doesn’t take this onboard whole-hog like News Corp. They are left-leaning, to be sure, but they’re not the insane hippy uncle that MSNBC has become. NBC Universal is actually trying to present a reasonable, relatively unbiased perspective and they want to extend that to their cable news network. Apparently that has become more difficult then they originally envisioned.
All this has done to me, at the end of the day, is make me go full circle back to CNN and Mr. Passive-Aggressive, Wolf Blitzer. Honestly, with a name like that you’d think he would have more balls.
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