Writing in the LA Times, Brian Anderson marks Fox News' tenth anniversary by smugly explaining that liberals don't hate Fox because it's conservative, they hate it because it's populist. And you know what? He's right. For instance, elite media pundits like myself will tell you that Mark Foley is a Republican. Fox knows better:
Of course, when Anderson calls Fox anti-elitist, he doesn't mean it in the sense of being opposed to plutocrats, or captains of industry, or the President of the United States. To Anderson, "elite" is synonymous for "educated liberal," and Fox's great innovation is to be an anti-educated-liberal channel. In that way, he's partially right: Fox isn't conservative, at least not in any recognizable sense of the ideology. It's partisan. And while a conservative channel would have some utility and claim to intellectual honesty, a partisan channel has none. Which is how you get the hackish distortion of reality pictured above.
