Democrats made a loud point of boycotting Fox News Channel for perceived bias when the party scheduled a long string of presidential debates since early last year. Interesting, then, to surf Fox and its two cable news competitors last night to see how they covered and analyzed primary results in Vermont, Rhode Island, Ohio and Texas.
Fox once again deployed veteran correspondent Brit Hume to anchor the election coverage. Hume, who won an Emmy for his Gulf War coverage, turned to conservative commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity for analysis on what the election returns meant.
MSNBC, by contrast, chose to allow Daily Kos regular Keith Olbermann to co-anchor the network’s coverage along with Chris Matthews, who is a former aide to Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. The two liberals then spent the night interviewing the network’s actual journalists, like Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert.
We know MSNBC wants to position itself as the liberal alternative to Fox, but it could at least keep the adults in charge instead of turning the entire operation over to former Democratic operatives and nutroots bloggers.
