Rachel Maddow is allowed to give her take on Fox and its deceptive and biased broadcasting. This is still America and she is free to speak her mind. But Maddow was right, even though it would take a high level of interest on the part of the viewer to see when and where the stories on fox are being filtered and encoded.
I watch Fox often to see how they work a story, it is fascinating to watch. Stories gain labels and key parts of stories are left out if the idea or opposing point of view conflicts with their ideological stance. Often I turn to it for some contemporary story to see the slant they give it. Anyone who doubts this strong bias is simply a choir member of their church. Watch it and compare it to reality. Reality is too complex for most.
There is a fascinating story in the November 2010 Harpers that details Murdoch's marriage to the republicans after the FCC and Neut allowed him to pretty much break the laws of our communications boundaries. Is it any wonder Americans are labeled dumb today when a foreigner, a billionaire takes over the airways to present his ideological nonsense and our representatives allow it because he gives them millions. Some immigrants are loved it seems.
Murdoch triumphant: How we could have stopped him?twice?By Marvin Kitman (Harper's Magazine) [this is on pay basis, but lots of articles in cyberspace confirm pov]
"Orwell famously worried about the divorce of public discourse, including journalism, from truth, but he did not anticipate its remarriage to entertainment. Journalism, whose practitioners in high-end newspapers and early broadcast outlets once saw their task as recording the truth, now largely function to hold up a mirror for us to see our fun-house reflection. The old journalistic paradigm posited a search for accuracy, objectivity, and fairness. The new pomo paradigm declares those goals misbegotten; they are inherently unachievable. Because everyone possesses and advocates for his or her own truth, the job of the reporter is not to adjudicate among competing assertions, but to assemble them into de facto collage. The fairness of contemporary journalism resembles not the fairness of a judge and jury weighing evidence within a framework of rules, but rather the fairground of the carnival midway, where barkers call out on behalf of their wares." Martin Kaplan
Above quote from, "What Orwell Didn't Know," read it if you are interesting the modern world of media.