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As a sidebar to the contentious issue of "objectivity," you might want to know the origin of Fox's slogan of "fair and balanced."

During the early 70s there was a pioneering effort to develop an alternative independent major news media feeder service that would be entirely objective. This effort, which intended to compete with the broadcast networks' own services, as well as Reuters, et al., was led by Bob Pauley, a former president of ABC Radio Network, Mutual Network, and founder of the National Black Network (the nation's first Black-owned and operated media network). Pauley believed in the importance of totally objective and apolitical news, and spoke out publicly many times against bias of any sort. He was one of the last network executives who actively espoused the notion of public trust, that is, of media as a steward of a publicly-owned airwaves.

Pauley put much of his own personal fortune into his company, Television News, or TVN, and was also backed by Joseph Coors, the Colorado beer magnate, and, as many of you know, a notorious political conservative. While Coors was motivated to correct what he saw as a predominantly liberal media, he did not insert himself into the management of TVN, and professed at least to believe in Pauley's ideal of objectivity -- neither left nor right, simply the news. Pauley was insistent on a firewall between investors and the actual news operations. His motto for TVN was "Fair and Balanced."

One of Pauley's managers was Roger Ailes, now the President of Fox News. While TVN did not survive, and cost both Pauley and Coors a bundle, it indubitably gave Roger Ailes something to think about. He borrowed the slogan, if not the pure idealism of TVN, and the rest is history.