Say Anything Blog

The Huffington Post has apparently gotten a hold of a Fox News internal memo which they feel indicates the news network’s bias against Democrats:

Huffington Post has obtained an internal Fox News memo written by the network’s Vice President of news. The memo details Fox’s game plan the day Democrats won control of both the Senate and the House.

You can read the whole memo at the link.  I assume that the “Vice President of news” they’re talking about is Sharri Berg, who was named Senior Vice President of News Operations for Fox in 2005.  Regardless, I think there’s one bit of information on the memo being displayed at Huffington Post which sort of blows this “scandal” out of the water.  From the upper right-hand corner of the memo:

“Editorial.”

I think we need to remember that news networks do more than just straight news.  Fox - like CNN and MSNBC, etc. - does news and opinion and has an editorial staff sort of like your local newspaper.  The idea that a member of Fox’s editorial staff wrote a memo expressing an opinion about how an story should be covered from an editorial standpoint is hardly surprising.  I’d be willing to bet that there are memos sort of like this one floating around at CNN, etc. all the time.

Which isn’t to say that Fox News doesn’t lean to the right.  They do.  They lean to the right like CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc. all lean to the left.  I actually think that Fox is a bit closer to the middle than those other stations (they certainly aren’t as far out in right field as some would have us believe), but whatever.

The simple truth here is that there isn’t anything all that inappropriate about this memo.