Karol over at Alarming News (as an aside, can anyone explain to me how any Soviet emigré can vote republican? What, you're not happy unless your government maintains gulags and tortures people?) approvingly quotes this oblivious drool from Roger Ailes, the chief propagandist of Fox "News":

“We haven’t had to fire our executives or our reporters or our anchors or anybody else for making up the news,” Ailes continued. “Maybe we’re a little too in-your-face at times. But basically what we do is cover the story, and we haven’t been forced to eat our words because we’re actually telling people what’s going on. Sometimes there’s more than one point of view, and we try to reflect that.”

Ailes must have an Olympic pool filled with spiked Kool-Aid, or perhaps a truly remarkable control over his facial tics, to be able to publicly utter this kind of delusional drivel. Here, take a look at the Wikipedia entry titled "Fox News channel controversies".

Photocopied memos from Fox News executive John Moody instructed the network's on-air anchors and reporters to use positive language when discussing pro-life viewpoints, the Iraq war, and tax cuts, as well as requesting that the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal be put in context with the other violence in the area [3]. Such memos were reproduced for the anti-FOX News film Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, which included Moody quotes such as, "[T]he soldiers [seen on FOX in Iraq ] in the foreground should be identified as 'sharpshooters,' not 'snipers,' which carries a negative connotation." Former Fox News producer Charlie Reina explained, "The roots of Fox News Channel's day-to-day on-air bias are actual and direct. They come in the form of an executive memo distributed electronically each morning, addressing what stories will be covered and, often, suggesting how they should be covered. To the newsroom personnel responsible for the channel's daytime programming, The Memo is the Bible. If, on any given day, you notice that the Fox anchors seem to be trying to drive a particular point home, you can bet The Memo is behind it."

There's more. Read it. Or just turn on your Teevee. Fox is television for right-wingers trying to convince themselves that other people are as creepily extremist as they are. Hence, their deep loyalty; Fox, for them, is the equivalent of a parent telling them it's OK to hit their little sister, Linus' blanket for the Timothy McVeigh crowd.

In point of fact, people have been fired from Fox – for accurate reporting or for being an inconveniently public racist asshole. So, yeah, former Reagan debate coach Ailes doesn't fire people for hard-right bias or propaganda – primarily because that is the network's purpose. You don't fire people for doing what you hired them to do. Which is presumably why Loofah Bill the phone-sex freak still has a job. Ailes' slogan "Fair and Balanced' has about as much credibility as any other marketing tool; it's a contrived device roughly comparable in accuracy to McDonald's attempt to pass itself off as a salad bar. The stench of extremist 'conservatism' clings to the conservative Fox like decay to a corpse, no matter how deep in denial the decadent right wing may be.

And that's the truth - fair and balanced.

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