Those pesky liberals!

You can tell why this story is a big deal for our fair-n-balanced friends today. One, it takes on those pesky liberal lies before they can get started! Two, it gives readers a break from the important policy headlines dominating the page:

Palin: McCain Won't 'Run
With the Washington Herd'

Oprah Not a Palin Fan?

And third, it lets you run a picture of a scantily (if patriotically) clad woman with huge tracts of land qualifications for executive office.


Seriously, it's good to know that Fox is continuing its policy of being proactive (see more about the heroic effort shown at right here) on stopping patently false rumors before they become part of the liberal media's hate-filled discourse. Take, for example, Lie (or Myth, or Unconfirmed Report) No. 3: Palin "wants creationism taught in school." Just because somebody asked her about creation and evilution during a televised debate and she said "Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both"! And the idea that she was almost recalled as mayor when all the City Council did was consider a recall motion ... I tell you, those media grow more shameless by the day.

The genuinely bizarre part, though, is Fox's apparent inability to tell the difference between a legitimate question -- when you say you're a proponent of teaching creationism in schools, do you mean it, or do you mean what you said when you backtracked? -- and the sort of bottom-feeding idiocy that believes every photo that turns up on the intertubes. Or what appears in every way to be a genuinely vicious lie about whose baby the youngest Palin offspring is.

From a content-analysis perspective, note the location of anger-at-rumor in the two examples here. In the earlier one, it's the Obama camp that's furious. In the new one, it's Fox. That says more or less all you need to know about Fox's journalistic orientation, but if you've been a regular Fox consumer, you already knew it.