But Collins' book is most compelling when showing how Murdoch tapped into conservative disaffection with the so-called "liberal media" -- and capitalized on the floundering of once-dominant CNN -- to become America's most watched cable news channel. The Aussie right-wing media mogul combined his business prowess with a conviction that the news media was hopelessly biased to give birth to his conservative cable baby in 1996. With former Nixon aide Ailes at the helm, Fox attracted right-leaning journalists convinced America's newsrooms were uninhabitable for people like them. John Moody, a former Time reporter and editor once stationed in Nicaragua, lamented how his magazine colleagues were "drawn ideologically, romantically, theoretically, to the side of the Sandinistas. I always was able to hold my enthusiasm." Moody defected to Fox, where he felt at home.

As a political consultant, Ailes was known as the master of the attack sound bite. At Fox, he devised the sleight-of-hand slogans "Fair and Balanced" and "We Report, You Decide," phrases that provide endless fodder for the likes of Al Franken and send journalism school professors apoplectic. But the Fox team denies bias -- they say they're correcting the course of a left-slanted media. Before Fox's launch, Murdoch taunted Turner by saying CNN was "too liberal," and needed a rival that would restore balance to TV news. Ailes said Fox's mission was to "be objective, to do fine journalism. We'd like to restore objectivity where we find it lacking." As Ailes told the New York Times Sunday Magazine in 2001: "In most news, if you hear a conservative point of view, that's called bias. We believe if you eliminate such a viewpoint, that's bias. If we look conservative, it's because the other guys are so far to the left."

Collins largely avoids the debate over whether the media does actually skew left, although he cites studies, like a 1995 Times Mirror poll that showed 40 percent of Americans identified as conservative while only 5 percent of journalists did. He might have acknowledged the strong arguments, presented most prominently by the Nation's Eric Alterman, that mainstream, corporate-owned media is not "liberal" at all. Any true lefty knows that corporate media-owned television news outlets do not reflect the "liberal" mindset. Million-dollar TV anchors who wine and dine with titans of government and business -- who themselves rank among the nation's most powerful and wealthy, with fortunes to protect -- don't tend toward the progressive. And TV news operations living and dying by ratings don't adequately cover progressive causes. Ever wonder why you aren't bombarded with TV news stories about the impoverished and the oppressed? Right.

But whether liberal bias rules TV news is almost beyond the point here. Ailes understood that perception is all that counts. "Somewhere between 65 and 75 percent of the American people believe the media tipped to the left," Ailes said, according to his own research. "Now whether it does or it doesn't, if that's what they believe, that leaves a lot of room as long as you don't tip to the right." Fox, of course, does tilt to the right, as any even casual observer would know. But this ruse of blazing an objective swath through a blindly biased news media is the foundation of Fox's philosophy.

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