McArdle chides the "naive American commentators" who "seem to think that [the Murdoch scandal] is somehow going to bring down Fox News":
I think people assume that taking out Murdoch somehow means that his papers and television properties will track back to the left, where media properties are supposed to belong. But this seems highly dubious. As far as I know, studies of media bias generally find that the political slant of newspapers tracks the politics of their readership; the New York Times is not visibly left-leaning because its reporters are fooling the folks on the Upper West Side, as conservatives complain, but because the folks on the Upper West Side demand news sources that agree with them. The same is true of the more conservative southern papers that liberals love to hate on.
And it's very true of Fox News.
In general, agreed. But the difference is that even biased media outlets of any type tend to draw the line at disseminating untruths and never correcting them (as Jon Stewart has amply demonstrated). That's why I don't put Fox in the category of biased media. it is, rather, propaganda, which is always indifferent to the truth, because its ultimate allegiance is to power.
The Dish 