The Other Bias at Fox News: Volume

"Seek out stories that cater to angry, middle-aged white men who listen to talk radio and yell at their televisions." That's what Gross recalls hearing. This directive had consequences, but not the kind we would call a conservative tilt or pro-Bush agenda. "What followed was a dumbing-down of what had been an ambitious and talented news operation," Gross writes. Dumbling down is not a right wing tilt. Nor does it fit into Fair and Balanced. It's something else.

Stories got shorter. What ran on the website had to be more like the "script" read on the air. (Which is using the Web to the opposite of its advantages.) The young--and often liberal--journalists who staffed the website found they had to fact check the news already broadcast by Fox correspondents. The on-air people were rushing to the next story and "couldn't be bothered," according to Gross.

Keep this in mind when Fox does things that are different from the standard model. They do round the clock cable news with a much smaller staff of reporters, producers and researchers.

"It wasn't that they were toeing some political line... it was that the facts of a story just didn't matter at all. The idea was to get those viewers out of their seats, screaming at the TV, the politicians, the liberals -- whoever -- simply by running a provocative story."

Almost all Murdoch properties identify themselves to us by means of the oldest marketing strategy there is: shock and awe, hype and miracle, outrage and scam, the language of screaming headlines. It's not just information with more excitement pumped into it (although that is true too) but also excitement as information.