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If you have never seen Fox News before, here is a four-minute clip that captures the essence of the network so perfectly that you need never watch anything on it again. It’s all here. At the center, you have an old conservative white guy who is enraged about a fact that exists only in his addled brain. At his side, there’s a blonde sidekick who nods along with him but doesn't get in the way. And ready to absorb his anger is the network’s Emmanuel Goldstein figure, feebly attempting a rebuttal that quickly devolves into a sniveling plea for civility:

This is factually untrue — Obama has offered a plan including more than a trillion dollars in reduced spending to a variety of programs, including Medicare and Social Security, as well as the reduced spending on interest payments.

But as even top intelligence officials have acknowledged, overclassification is rampant in government. Much basic information, without which effective national security reporting would be impossible, is reflexively classified, whether or not it poses any realistic security risks, and reporters routinely discuss such information with sources. In practice, that means the government can pick and choose which leakers to go after—and which ones to wink at, because they're serving the administration's interests. No doubt, the government does have an interest in—and an obligation—to protect legitimate secrets, but an aggressive campaign that targets reporters and subjects them to broad and secret intrusions (and maybe prosecutions as well) will undermine a necessary check on government power and prevent the public from learning crucial information about what is done in its name.

Other than two mentions of Tides on the show of Beck's Fox colleague Sean Hannity, Media Matters said it was unable to find any other mention of Tides on any news broadcast by any network over that same period. Beck declined comment.

The killings came after Beck told Fox viewers that he "can't debunk" the notion that FEMA was operating such camps -- but before he finally acknowledged that the conspiracy wasn't real.

Beck has at times spoken against violence, but he more often forecasts it, warning that "it is only a matter of time before an actual crazy person really does something stupid."

The drug war has killed 28,000 people in Mexico since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderon entered office vowing to take on the cartels, according to data from the government intelligence agency, known as CISEN. That’s keeping tourists away and limiting foreign direct investment, Fox said.

A 1997 Justice Department survey of more than 18,000 state and federal convicts revealed the truth: • 39.6% of criminals obtained a gun from a friend or family member • 39.2% of criminals obtained a gun on the street or from an illegal source • 0.7% of criminals purchased a gun at a gun show • 1% of criminals purchased a gun at a flea market • 3.8% of criminals purchased a gun from a pawn shop • 8.3% of criminals actually bought their guns from retail outlets

Note that less than 9 percent of all guns obtained by criminals in this survey came from retail outlets, hardly “a lot” compared to the almost 40 percent of convicts who obtained guns from friends or family or the almost 40 percent who obtained them illegally on the street.

Barack Obama just trounced a Republican opponent for the second time. But unlike four years ago, when most conservatives saw it coming, Tuesday's result was, for them, an unpleasant surprise. So many on the right had predicted a Mitt Romney victory, or even a blowout -- Dick Morris, George Will, and Michael Barone all predicted the GOP would break 300 electoral votes.

Those audiences were misinformed.

We celebrate truth as a virtue, but only in the abstract. What we really need in our search for truth is a commodity that used to be at the heart of good journalism: facts - along with a willingness to present those facts without fear or favor. To the degree that broadcast news was a more virtuous operation 40 years ago, it was a function of both fear and innocence. Network executives were afraid that a failure to work in the "public interest, convenience and necessity," as set forth in the Radio Act of 1927, might cause the Federal Communications Commission to suspend or even revoke their licenses.

On the innocence side of the ledger, meanwhile, it never occurred to the network brass that news programming could be profitable.

It was an imperfect, untidy little Eden of journalism where reporters were motivated to gather facts about important issues. We didn't know that we could become profit centers. No one had bitten into that apple yet.

My complaints about Obama are not that he is too bipartisan or too centrist. I am at bottom a weak-tea Dewey-Eisenhower-Rockefeller social democrat – that is, with a small “s” and a small “d.” My complaints are that he is not technocratic enough, that he is pursuing the chimera of “bipartisanship” too far, and that, as a result, many of his policies will not work well, or at all.

U.S. President Barack Obama could be forced to find a way to intervene without putting troops on the ground

Tina Fey's caricature of Palin as an unprepared high-school student trying to bluff her way through an oral exam by mugging and flirting hit its mark not merely because of the genius of the mimicry, but because of its fundamentally accurate diagnosis of Palin as bullshit artist. Palin's exuberant incoherence testifies to an unusually wide gulf between confidence and ability. She is proud of what she doesn't know and contemptuous of those "experts" and "elitists" who are too knowledgeable to be trusted. This curious self-regard echoes through her book, Going Rogue, described by the critic Jonathan Raban as "a four-hundred-page paean to virtuous ignorance."

But the best Palinisms of all result when the huntress encounters something she wasn't hunting for—that is, when Sarah Palin comes into contact with most anything to do with domestic, foreign, or economic policy.

The issue is that she rarely appears to have the slightest grasp of what she's talking about even when she's supposed to know what she's talking about.

What brings this journalistic parable to mind is the arrogantly unapologetic way that Andrew Breitbart has reacted to the furor over the ripped-out-of-context Shirley Sherrod speech excerpt that he posted on his website. Choosing bluster over blushing, Breitbart told Matt Lewis in a Politics Daily interview: "I couldn't wait to get this story. I knew from past experience that I had a news cycle to get this out." Later in the interview, Breitbart underscored his cavalier publish-or-perish approach to fact-checking: "It had to be done at the exact moment in time that the press would notice it." A new report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism details how the Sherrod charade migrated from conservative blogs taking their cues from Breitbart to Fox News and then to CNN.

What are these candidates hiding from? The Politico story subscribes to the sports metaphor, explaining that the candidates are "running out the clock." If they say nothing, they won't get caught saying anything stupid, the theory goes.

But when politicians beat this sort of a retreat, they're not signaling that they fear the questions but that they fear the answers.

But filter-free media are self-limiting. To begin with, anything that Sarah Palin tweets goes out unfiltered. That's all well and good, but within seconds, the uber-media will suck it up, interpret it, fact-check it, and spit it out, making a mockery of her unfilteredness. Second, because the nonpress media speak primarily to supporters, they simply preach to the converted. To win, candidates must speak to more than the congregation, which requires conventional media exposure. Third, appearing on a friendly soundstage comes at a cost. A Tea Partier speaking on Fox News is just as prone to committing a campaign-debilitating gaffe as one taking a pummeling from aggressive reporters.

Fox News is awash in experts like Ablow: retired judges, generals, or CIA agents willing to serve as well-credentialed sidekicks for the network’s roster of demagogues. But what makes Ablow so valuable to the network are those two little letters after his name, M.D. He can stamp his medical imprimatur--he’s “America’s psychiatrist,” according to himself--on just about any right-wing political narrative.

“If I seem to say things with certainty, it comes from being able to register underlying truths that I feel very clearly about,” he says. “I don’t accept that these ideas have to be relegated to analysts’ couches or therapists’ basement offices. That’s the stuff of stigma.”

“I learned a long time ago that to talk about things four years from now was folly.” He’s right, of course, but, when the time comes to make up his mind, Ablow probably won’t keep his audience waiting long for an answer.

Fox News is awash in experts like Ablow: retired judges, generals, or CIA agents willing to serve as well-credentialed sidekicks for the network’s roster of demagogues. But what makes Ablow so valuable to the network are those two little letters after his name, M.D. He can stamp his medical imprimatur--he’s “America’s psychiatrist,” according to himself--on just about any right-wing political narrative.