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While you're enjoying Friday morning's Fair 'n' Balanced homepage (in order, Brave Massster! Wicked, tricksy Soros! Hobbitses are mean to Massster! Massster makes us happy!), ponder what it might look like when different arms of the Murdoch empire start to disagree with each other. Here's the Journal, for example, from the beginning of the week:

The report concludes “with high confidence” that Mr. Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election” to “undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.” It also concludes that Mr. Putin “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

Yet the report offers no evidence or judgment that the hacking influenced the election result. The leaks from Clinton aide John Podesta’s email and the Democratic National Committee were embarrassing in their candid views of individuals, but they included no bombshells. The emails that really hurt Mrs. Clinton’s electability were those she kept on a private server while Secretary of State.

My, my, my. That's certainly not what Massster said at his news conference!

But remember this — we talk about the hacking, and hacking's bad, and it shouldn't be done, but look at the things that were hacked. Look at what was learned from that hacking, that Hillary Clinton got the questions to the debate and didn't report it? That's a horrible thing. That's a horrible thing. Can you imagine that if Donald Trump got the questions to the debate, it would have been the biggest story in the history of stories, and they would have said immediately, "You have to get out of the race." Nobody even talked about it. It's a very terrible thing.

Nor, of course, is it what Fox thought as those bombshells kept landing:

Should you have actually read the stories, you probably agree with the Journal: Even the ones that Fox fabricated (no, the Clinton Foundation didn't pay for Chelsea's wedding; no, "a longtime Clinton confidant" didn't "express regret that the terrorist wasn't a white man") fall apart in the sad light of day. That doesn't mean that the emails on the Sekret Server were the ones that "really hurt Mrs. Clinton's electability"; the Journal is making that up, because that's what editorial writers do with fact claims about public opinion. It means that "the emails" worked as a Fox story because real issues and fake issues became indistinguishable.

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