Someone called a spade a spade...

Selected passage from excellent article.

Why can't American journalists steeped in the traditional values of
their profession be loud and candid about the fact that Murdoch does
not belong to our team? His importation of the loose rules of British
tabloid journalism, including blatant political alliances, started our
slide to quasi-news. His British papers famously promoted Margaret
Thatcher's political career, with the expectation that she would open
the nation's airwaves to Murdoch's cable channels. Ed Koch once told
me he could not have been elected mayor of New York without the
boosterism of the New York Post.

As for Fox's campaign against the Obama administration, perhaps the
only traditional network star to put Ailes on the spot, at least a
little, has been his friend, the venerable Barbara Walters, who was
hosting ABC's Sunday morning talk show. More accurately, she allowed
another guest, Arianna Huffington, to belabor Ailes recently about his
biased coverage of Obama. Ailes countered that he should be judged as
a producer of ratings rather than a journalist -- audience is his only
yardstick. While true as far as it goes, this hair-splitting defense
purports to absolve Ailes of responsibility for creating a news
department whose raison d'etre is to dictate the outcome of our
nation's political discourse.

For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the
United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion
of one political party. And let no one be misled by occasional spurts
of criticism of the GOP on Fox. In a bygone era of fact-based
commentary typified, left to right, by my late colleagues Scotty
Reston and Bill Safire, these deceptions would have been given their
proper label: disinformation.

From:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...031102523.html