[rrpjr]

Good points. What Fox News did that so scandalized the major media was to challenge the presumption that a conservative had to be a token. For 50 years the cosmopolitan media wrote the rules and controlled the game as surely as the ancien regime of France. Then along came Fox. But Fox didn't merely set up their own rigged game -- they gave plenty of air time to liberals, too. They approached the operation of a news channel as a great free-for-all of debate. And they rewrote the rules for how to report a story -- tell both sides. Imagine! More than that, they stripped away all the old solemnizing negativity of the elites. They wrote and reported stories with fresh and bracing balance. They combined their intrepid and fair reporting with cheerfully unapologetic conservative commentary. They were both fair and cheerful -- how much worse can you get for a leftist! Yet the people appreciated it, as Roger Ailes, groomed at TVN in the 1970s (TVN originated the slogan "fair and balanced") knew they would.