FOX NEWS ADMITS BIAS!

According to Timothy Noah, writing in Slate, he's found an admission of Fox News bias by Scott Norvell, London bureau chief of Fox News, that ranks right up there with the great obvious admissions of all time:

I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to compare Norvell's op-ed to the Vatican's belated admission, after 359 years, that Galileo had it right when he said the earth revolved around the sun.

So, what did Norvell admit that Noah stumbled onto that no-one else seems to have found to be significant? Norvell in the 20 May WSJ:

Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally, and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly. And those who hate us can take solace in the fact that they aren't subsidizing Bill's bombast; we payers of the BBC license fee don't enjoy that peace of mind.

Fox News is, after all, a private channel and our presenters are quite open about where they stand on particular stories. That's our appeal. People watch us because they know what they are getting. The Beeb's institutionalized leftism would be easier to tolerate if the corporation was a little more honest about it.

Isolated from its original context the post seems oddly truncated, you know, as if something had been left out. That's because Noah has engaged in editing that rivals Tim Dunlop's recent anti-Chrenkoff effort. Here's the Norvell quote in context (WSJ paid subscription required, so you'll have to take my word on this unless you're paid up or want to buy the article):

The recent takeover of Manchester United by American sports magnate Malcolm Glazer was the perfect platform for these biases to poke through. The hostile takeover of a football team is obviously more emotional than the takeover of, say, a car manufacturer, but the Beeb has so far proven itself to be everything a public broadcaster shouldn't be on the topic.

On the evening Mr. Glazer's two-year effort to take over the club gelled, the flagship Ten O'Clock News' take on it was a two-minute ad for the anti-Glazer camp. Effigies were burned. Angry fans marched. League officials expressed dismay. The correspondent closed the report claiming the deal would be bad for shareholders, bad for fans and bad for Manchester. Bad bad bad.

The tone has persisted. The BBC's online product continues to portray the takeover as an effort by a rogue financier with a funny beard and no heart, who wants to "take Manchester away from the people and into the hands of market forces." Never mind that Man U has been a public company for 14 years and, as one of the most valuable sports brands in the world, market forces are as much part of the team as red face paint and the smell of stale lager.

The wrong here is not that the BBC is portraying Mr. Glazer and his bid as unpopular -- they are. It's that the BBC's mandate is not to pander, tabloid-style, to its audiences or use the story as a springboard for its anti-free market ideology. Its mandate explicitly calls for "impartial" coverage, and that's not what I and millions of other U.K. residents are getting for our license fee in this and many other cases.

Nor is it wrong that lefty voices are heard on the BBC. There is a place for them, but not to the exclusion of rightish ones. Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally, and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly. And those who hate us can take solace in the fact that they aren't subsidizing Bill's bombast; we payers of the BBC license fee don't enjoy that peace of mind.

Fox News is, after all, a private channel and our presenters are quite open about where they stand on particular stories. That's our appeal. People watch us because they know what they are getting. The Beeb's institutionalized leftism would be easier to tolerate if the corporation was a little more honest about it.

So, Norvell is comparing actual instances of BBC leftist bias, as he sees it, with alleged rightist bias on the part of Fox News. It also seems to have escaped Noah's notice that Norvell was trying to be funny.

Is Timothy Noah an idiot or what? (He must be an idiot, the loonies at Democratic Underground have headlined his piece on the DU homepage.)

Update: Need more proof this Norvell thing's a beat-up? The once rational Andrew Sullivan has it as THE QUOTE OF THE DAY for 31 May.