Replies

Fox went to hell long ago.

Sure did. O'Reilly was never a conservative, just one of our ( New Yorkers ) Rockefeller Republicans morphing into a limousine liberal as he got rich. Hannity is of course a bona fide conservative but was purposefully balanced against Colmes from the very beginning. No-one else on that network in the early years was remotely conservative. Pretty much one conservative for every 50 liberals and 100 squishy moderates.

When Fox the TV network began, I mean when Murdoch bought up local stations and literally began to create the 4th national network, among them was "Metromedia", a local Tri-State TV channel people could get over the air. It was, how can we describe it, "loose" and "freewheeling" and "informal" and "street" and "edgy" and "morning-zoo" style, not the prim and proper stuffed shirt stuff. This style carried over to the new network proper "Fox 5" in the live shows and news broadcasts and related. This is a bit of New York or Tri-State ( especially Jersey ) street style, and our local stuff in the city and vicinity was often like this.

Then when Murdoch and Ailes got into cable with FNC, it was instantly present on every nearly single thing they did as they were really an extension of the Fox mother ship. O'Reilly and Hannity/Colmes were great examples of "edgy" near-tabloid style news which was intentional to break away from the Koppel/Jennings/Rather/CNN prototype. They did have more organized straight stuff like Catherine Crier and Paula Zahn, later Greta, but nearly every show had that "rebel" approach, intentionally. They also had chics in short skirts. Blondes. Blondes in skirts. The point is, people all around the country who were not familiar with the Murdoch tabloid style ( eventually parodies in Idiocracy ) set their hopes way too high for this network.

Except for Hannity, FNC was clearly in the tank for Clinton around the impeachment fiasco which was not long after they first went on the air, and then mostly took the side of the Fascist regime during the Elian Gonzalez kidnapping. Had they been around during Waco it would have been more of the same.

It was patently unfair the treatment O'Reilly got, and it pains me to say that since I can't stand him one bit. Hated him since he went on a virtue jihad when Strom Thurmond died. Actually it was a year before before that when he turned 100 years old and BOR jumped on the politically correct bandwagon attacking Trent Lott for complimenting the old man saying he would have been a great President. But when he died, he attacked one of his guests representing Thurmond's halfrican daughter by a black lady who Strom Thurmond had a relationship with and supported secretly her entire life. Apparently his daughter wasn't willing to criticize her father for being a dixiecrat in the 1948 election against Truman. Always wanted to ask him:, "Hey Bill, Strom Thurmond the guy you keep calling racist has a black daughter, what do you got?". Douchebag.

Ironically they are more conservative today than in the past with Hannity, Waters, Pirro, ummm, okay that's three, two more than in the past except for those couple years with Glenn Beck before he went insane. Murdoch Inc. served us a crap sandwich which was slightly more edible than the diarrhea on the menu at CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and PBS.