The gals from Outfoxed employ their own definition of impartiality. It is, to say the least, unique--and more than a little malleable.

Those wacky newshounds (another fine product of the Outfoxed cabal) say their purpose in life is to expose how the evil Fox News Channel “lies and distorts its ‘news’ reporting and spins in favor of the Republican party”. Of course one pup’s spin is another man’s balance, and it’s intriguing that their “manifesto” never does spell out the principles that the doggies consider to represent fairness or balance. So one is left to read their articles to determine exactly what standards they apply to build their irrefutable case. That’s where things get a little dicey, since the newspoodles don’t exactly follow the guidelines taught in journalism 101. For example:

Today (October 20, 2004) during Dayside w/Linda Vester, Fox aired twelve minutes of a live Bush speech from Rochester, Minnesota....Also, has anyone seen any significant Fox coverage over the last few days of a live Kerry speech, be it a "major speech" or an everyday stump speech? I sure haven't.

This is presented to the reader as an example of bias, reinforced by the sly implication (devoid of data) that Kerry’s speeches don’t get covered. Now, for a site that says “we watch Fox so you won’t have to”, one would think that the pooches wouldn’t have to guess, or speculate, or ask rhetorical questions about Kerry coverage. They would know.

Of course they know. They have eight hound dogs monitoring the channel day and night; it’s not like they need readers to answer that question. The facts: just hours earlier that very same day, at 11:34, Fox did in fact broadcast Kerry’s stump speech, live and uninterrupted for ten minutes. (And that’s pretty close to the eleven minutes--not twelve as the mutts claim--allocated to Bush.) Would one say in this instance that the newshounds are “spinning”? That they “lie and distort” their coverage of Fox?

Another example, this from that bastion of doggie impartiality, chrish:

Brit [Hume] said the polls of likely voters in Florida were wrong - showed Bush with a comfortable lead - and [pollster] John [McLaughlin] asserted that there's "also the news cycle factor. In Florida on Thursday when the DWI story hit Bush went from 5 point lead to 44-44% dead heat, though the weekend. That increased voter turnout..." and Brit cut him off with "Gotcha." and ended the segment, politely but abruptly. Comment: Oops, shouldn't have reminded people about that DWI, John.

Abruptly? It was 6:27 pm, which happens to be the time this segment ends on every broadcast. That’s what’s called a hard break, since commercials must be played before the headlines at the bottom of the hour. Chrish knows this of course, but cheap shots are just too tempting, even if it means she is “lying”, “spinning”, or “distorting”.

Here is an entry even more revealing of the mongrels’ notion of "fairness":

[Alan] Colmes just happened to bring up the Pat Robertson "controversy," that Bush told Robertson there would be no casualties in an Iraq war. That just happened to provide an opening for [Carl] Cameron to detail Bush's side of the story.

No wonder the doggies are upset with Fox--one of their reporters actually gave both sides of a controversial story! Yes, incredible as it may seem, telling both sides is not fair and balanced, it is “bias”. And lest you think this was an isolated hound incident:

[Steve] Brown then said: "Now, the National Rifle Association did not let Kerry's hunting photo op go unchallenged. The NRA bought a full page ad in the Youngstown, Ohio newspaper"....They just couldn't let that video of Kerry stand on it's own, could they? They had to hit it hard by inserting the NRA blurb...

Is the pattern starting to become clear? To the newspooches, the only way a report could be fair would be to ignore the full page ad. Just tell what’s favorable to their guy. The viewers are better off not knowing. Because including all the news is “spinning”. It’s “lying” and “distorting” unless your segment has been cleansed of anything that doesn’t favor John Kerry. This has been one of the curs’ favorite charges against Campaign Carl Cameron:

On Special Report today, October 21, Carl Cameron continued his pattern of debating the video footage of John Kerry on the campaign trail....Carl makes an issue of a hunting partner carrying the goose that Kerry bagged from the field, merely by mentioning it at all, and introduced a clip of Cheney "mocking" Kerry's hunting camouflage outfit and reminding us that Kerry has an "F" from the NRA. Carl told us Bush also chimed in...Another day, another partisan hack job by Campaign Carl.

As you can see, according to chrish, Cameron’s sin is that he reports not only what Kerry says, but also the response from the other side. We can’t have that! That’s “lying”! That’s “spinning”! Unless, of course, it’s a segment on George Bush:

At the end of Jim Angle's report on today's (10/21) Bush campaign activities on Special Report, a still picture of Bush and Cardinal Justin Regali, Archbishop of Philadelphia, was shown for 15 seconds....Angle reported: "Of course a savvy person, a savvy Catholic voter, for instance, might be able to read between the lines." Comment: This piece gets an "F" for subtlety...just a blatant Bush ad.

Of course it wasn’t 15 seconds; one hardly expects truth from the hounds on such matters. But what to make of chrish’s comment that this report was a “blatant Bush ad”? Just minutes earlier the same tail-wagger was complaining that the Kerry piece wasn’t one-sided enough! Here is some of Angle’s report that chrish forgot to mention:

ANGLE: Sen Kerry says his plan would take some 25 million people off the rolls of the uninsured, three times what the President’s plan would.
ANGLE: Both men would rely on government programs to help children, and Sen Kerry claims he would make government funded health care available to all children.
ANGLE: Now, health care is an issue on which Sen Kerry consistently leads in the polls.

Doesn’t this mean that Angle is “debating the video footage” of Bush exactly as chrish accused Cameron of doing? But the anti-Fox terriers have no problem when it’s done to Bush--in fact, they deliberately omit it from their report so readers will never know! But when it’s done in a Kerry report, it’s a “partisan hack job”.

There’s a lot of “lying”, “spinning”, and “distorting” going on here, but it’s not Fox doing it. Just check out those paw prints.