15 April 2008

Teh Rupert owns everything, part eleventy-thousand

Jonathan Schwarz covers the museum dedicated to Our Sensible Media, the Newseum, for Mother Jones.

What would it look like if Fox News produced a segment about bias in the media? Certainly it would follow the standard Fox format: conservative activists such as Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid "balanced" by middle of the road corporate journalists like Clarence Page, along with Fox anchor Brit Hume and Fox contributor Juan Williams. After due deliberation, they would gravely agree that the media, sadly, has an obvious liberal tilt.

Such a segment on media bias does exist. It's not on Fox, though; it's at the Newseum, America's "Interactive Museum of News" in Washington, D.C. The Newseum reopened last Friday amid great hoopla after a move to a giant new building near the Smithsonian and an extremely expensive redesign.

Where can he be...he's lurking in the woods..he's coming out to...

Where did the Newseum get this Fox ethos? Perhaps it's a bizarre coincidence. Or perhaps it's that the video is part of an exhibit funded by $10 million from Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
Oh, there he is! Sadly, this "New Republic to Free Republic" spectrum is hardly limited to Rupert's enterprises anymore, as Kristol's posting at the Times aptly demonstrates. Surely, there must be a lefty less embarrassing than a man functionally incapable of ever being right about anything, but Kristol stays because he is within the window of acceptable mainstream ideas. Wisdom and general acuity has nothing to do with it.

ALSO: Now's a great time to revisit Schwarz's uncovering the lost Kristol tapes.