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Fox is the GOP.....or is it the other way round?

Fox News has been the subject of criticism for quite some time now. The calibre of people appearing on it are often rabid and some would say almost to the point of unhinged. How else to explain that one of it's most popular so-called commentators still peddles the question whether Obama is a Muslim? The network's tag" Fair and Balanced" is an oxymoron - and couldn't be further from the truth!

It's a subject that Nobel Economics prize winner, and something of a liberal gadfly, takes up in his latest op-ed piece in The New York Times. Bottom line, Fox News is the GOP - or perhaps it's the reverse.

"....... Fox News seems to have decided that it no longer needs to maintain even the pretense of being nonpartisan.

Nobody who was paying attention has ever doubted that Fox is, in reality, a part of the Republican political machine; but the network — with its Orwellian slogan, “fair and balanced” — has always denied the obvious. Officially, it still does. But by hiring those G.O.P. candidates, while at the same time making million-dollar contributions to the Republican Governors Association and the rabidly anti-Obama United States Chamber of Commerce, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox, is signaling that it no longer feels the need to make any effort to keep up appearances.

Something else has changed, too: increasingly, Fox News has gone from merely supporting Republican candidates to anointing them. Christine O’Donnell, the upset winner of the G.O.P. Senate primary in Delaware, is often described as the Tea Party candidate, but given the publicity the network gave her, she could equally well be described as the Fox News candidate. Anyway, there’s not much difference: the Tea Party movement owes much of its rise to enthusiastic Fox coverage."

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