I agree that anyone who represents the Democratic party has earned not having the benefit of the doubt given to them (especially John Kerry) and I wish Rupert Murdoch was a conservative rather than a man who saw a niche that could be taken advantage of.
I hope Brit isn't softening, and given that he seems to read FR regularly, I find it hard to believe that he is. Maybe if he had a straight up conservative (say, Mark Steyn, Bob Tyrell) rather than only center-right and liberal-left panel mates, the panel wouldn't, as a whole, follow conventional wisdom as much. I suppose the panel limited by the fact that everyone on the panel has to be able to gather in D.C... I think Special Report is also somewhat limited by the fact that it, by itself, cannot dominate the news cycle, i.e. if the NY Times or CBS reports on something, it becomes news to rest of the MSM, whereas Fox News only has that kind of influence if what they report hurts conservatives, President Bush in particular.
Conservatives used to have Time Magazine (conservative by today's standards), the Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest, etc. Today it seems that every organ of the MSM leans to the left, whether it's a news weekly, a tv show, a woman's magazine, a movie studio, a men's magazine or a science magazine.
I keep hearing about ultra rich leftists like Soros. Are there any ultra rich conservatives who could start something like a right wing studio or channel? The closest thing I've heard on tv like that was probably stuff from Pat Robertson, like his rip off of Special Report and his Family Channel. Of course, there was Conrad Black, but that brings up the other problem-- if an ultra-rich conservative Republican did invest in such a project, the leftist and media legal establishment would go after him faster than if he lived in Palm Beach County.
You make a lot of good points. About the media, I wonder what Richard Mellon Scaife is doing nowadays. He used to fund The American Spectator, but stopped when they gave up on pursuing the Vince Foster story (and that's all I know about him). Maybe Rush could gather together some like-minded people and start a network. :) After all, now that there's cable, it's not so impossible as it used to be when there was the Big Three and nothing else.