Palin joins Fox

It probably says it all.

This morning's Telegraph reports that Sarah Palin has signed a deal with Fox news,months after stepping down as governor of Alaska.

According to the paper

The conservative star will not have her own show, but will contribute to various news programmes and present an occasional series involving ordinary American heroes.

The speculation being that she will establish herself on the right wing channel just in time for a shot at the 2012 presidency

Fox attracts the largest audience for Obama's Afghnaistan speech

It appears that over in America,politicians can still command large TV audiences.

The figures out for Barack Obama's speech at Westpoint academy when he announced future policy in Afghanistan reached over 40m people.

The strange thing being,or perhaps not so strange was that it was Fox news that got the highest ratings attracting over 4.55 million of those viewers, more than CNN and MSNBC combined.

The irony being that that was the station that the Obama regime attempted to freeze out earlier in the year.

Remember this from Anita Dunn, the White House communications director.

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,“As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Fox was the only network to cover Bush's return to Texas

According to the Huffington Post

Fox News was the only major national TV outlet that carried a live telecast of former President Bush's homecoming speech to cheering supporters in Midland, Texas.

Maybe payback time for all the support that the Bush presidency gave to the network

Oh dear-Murdoch not happy with his bio

The news is that Rupert Murdoch is rather unhappy about a new biography.

Six weeks before publication according to International Tribune he is unhappy with the part

that suggest that he is at times embarrassed by Fox News, which he owns, and its chief executive, Roger Ailes, and that he often shares "the general liberal apoplexy," as Wolff writes in the book, toward Fox News and its perceived conservative slant.

Anyway the book should make good redaing and a 10,000 word section is due to be published in the December isssue of Vanity Fair

Ht-Adrian Monck

Fox targets CNN and claims its audience is more balanced

Ahead of the Democratic convention,Fox news is fighting back over bias claims.The American news channel has taken out an advert which targets CNN which according to the Huffington Post

inserting the word "partisan" into CNN's "CNN = Politics" logo to read, "CNN = Partisan Politics" and declaring Fox news "The Only Fair & Balanced News Network."

Really?

Well the channel is using a report from Pew which looked at audience segmentation and how it digested news across all platforms.One of its findings was that

the audiences for specific cable news outlets remain divided along political lines. Currently 51% of regular CNN viewers are Democrats, up from 45% two years ago. Nearly four-in-ten regular Fox News viewers are Republicans (39%), about the same as in 2006

Meanwhile if you want evidence of the battle that Fox has take a look at this Fox report from Denver where protesters make their feelings on Fox's coverage

How Fox nearly missed Jackson's comments

One of the stories of the week concerning Jesse Jackson's off air comments about Barack Obama nearly didn't get picked up.

The Huffington Post reports that

Jackson made the comments to a guest before an interview on Sunday's "Fox & Friends," whispering that Obama was "talking down to black people" and that Jackson wanted to "cut his nuts off.
The comments went unnoticed in the control room, Bill Shine, Fox News' senior vice president for programming, said Thursday.
The scathing remarks first came to the attention of an employee working the overnight shift Sunday, who transcribed the tape as part of training for the network's ongoing digital conversion. Otherwise, "it potentially would have not been discovered," Shine said.

More evidence of Fox News bias

A Freudian slip.Perhaps as Fox news analysit Liz Trotta seems to suggest that it would be better if both Osama and Obama were knocked off

Murdoch wants Sky to turn into Fox

A read with horror this from the Guardian media this morning

Murdoch said he wanted Sky News, which has confounded cynics by maturing into a well-funded and award-winning 24-hour news operation, to be more like Fox News to make it "a proper alternative to the BBC".

For those who have never watched Fox which is available on the Sky platform,it is without doubt one of the most right wing and bigoted stations that you hope to watch in a Democratic society.So much so that Democrats refuse to appear on it.



Adrian Monck has very kindly reproduced Roger Ailes' evidence to the House of Lords committee which I have reporoduced in part here

The Committee were told that Fox News was launched because Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch believed that there was space in the market for “fair and balanced” news. They believed that most news reporting has a left of centre bias. The Committee heard from other witnesses that Fox News provides a right of centre product. However, Mr Ailes vigorously denied this. He stated that the channel has no particular political agenda and an effort is made to balance the stories they produce, although he also said that on some days the channel acts as a balance to the rest of the media.

Really????

Murdoch seems to think that Sky will

" may become more like Fox, even if there was no overhaul of news impartiality laws by Ofcom, by copying its presentational style. He complained that changes had not been made because "nobody at Sky listens to me".

Lets hope that Sky continue not to listen to him then