Charles C. W. Cooke:
More than any other subject, apolitical sorts will ask me about Fox News. “Is it really crazy?” my British friends inquire, flashing the sort of smile that a botanist might exhibit while examining a newly discovered species of moss. “Is it, like, really right wing?”
The question has always slightly irritated me, showing as it does that the considerable success that the Left has had in demonizing its opposition extends even across the Atlantic. Certainly, both Fox’s commentary and its ostensibly straight reporting are marked by the right-leaning proclivities of its owners. But the notion that the network is unique in exhibiting bias is one of the more egregious planks of Western conventional wisdom — and especially so because it seems patently obvious to me that if one were to single out for palpable eccentricity a cable-news station in the United States, it would not be Fox. It would be MSNBC.
Take a quick look at the numbers. A recent Pew study revealed that the supposedly neutral CNN spent 54 percent of its time broadcasting “news” and 46 percent of its time hosting “opinion.” Fox, by contrast, transmits 55 percent opinion and 45 percent news. But MSNBC — well, MSNBC consists of a remarkable 85 percentopinion and only 15 percent news. This has consequences. During the election, Pew added, the ratio of unfavorable to favorable treatment in stories about Mitt Romney on MSNBC was roughly 23-to-1, and the negative-to-positive ratio for Barack Obama on Fox News was 8-to-1.
“Biased” doesn’t cut it. To watch MSNBC for an afternoon is not so much to be given a slanted account of what is happening here in America, but instead to witness a series of discussions about current events in parallel America II — a rather silly place in which the political center of gravity and all things Good are defined by the preferences of the faculty at Berkeley and the comments section of the Daily Kosand in which anyone who dissents from this position is believed to possess two heads, a black heart, and a pocket copy of Mein Kampf.
America II, as anyone who watches the channel will discover rather swiftly, hosts a supermajority of well-meaning multi-culti, progressive types whose foolproof plans for explosive economic growth, uniform social justice, and general human utopia are constantly being undone by a blossoming white-supremacist movement, split apart by neo-secessionists, and existentially threatened by traitors whose defining characteristic is a never-quite-explained hatred for progress. America II features no gray areas whatsoever: All local variation is apartheid, each and every identification requirement is the second coming of Jim Crow, all criticism of the government is sedition. It’s exhausting.
PMSNBC should be forced to provide equal time for the GOP since it is an arm of the DNC