Bill O'Reilly

Last March, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters, the network’s National Security Analyst, added to the turmoil when he emailed colleagues he was quitting after 10 years because he was “ashamed” of what his employer had become. Implicit but not stated in Peters’s diatribe, is the lurking specter of censorship. He accused the network’s primetime hosts of “dismissing facts and empirical reality to launch profoundly dishonest assaults” against the network’s targeted enemies. 

It was certainly far from being a revolution; it looked more like a collective revulsion at the wealthiest Americans, as the middle class watches its assets dwindle along with its fantasy of ever joining the ranks of the 1 percent. What did they want? Their fair share, more regulation on a system that's seemingly rigged to benefit the uber-rich, a crash diet for the fat cats who own Washington and leave the rest far, far behind. They want the promise of opportunities and upward mobility, which now seem to have faded to the far side of the moon. 

It is by no means a novel endeavor to denounce conservative media outlets for their often sinister operating practices and wanton dissemination of agenda-driven, sensationalist propaganda, which they distribute rather brazenly under the guise of “factual news.” The rather less-than-ideal qualities of institutions such as Fox News Channel, the cable news channel owned by the Murdoch media leviathan, News Corporation, seem almost so obvious as to make writing about them largely redundant. Yet Fox News Channel has managed to eclipse other cable news networks in popularity for the better part of a decade. 

Edward R.