Look Into My Eyes and Repeat After Me: Fair and Balanced...Fair and Balanced...Fair and Balanced....

Paul Krugman makes the now obvious observation:

As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.

Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.

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.

I'm not sure any Fox viewers actually care, but the Fox cable network has become the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. Or perhaps it's the reverse, the Republican Party has become the political arm of Fox and Friends (the wealthy ones).  "As the Republican political analyst David Frum put it, 'Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox'" (Krugman) .

(Fox lovers might retort, "Well, MSNBC does the same for the Democrats." There is some truth in that, I suppose, but at the same time, the hosts of the political shows on MSNBC have not been shy about criticizing Obama and his administration, in the process showing their political independence.)