Objectivity is lost to Fox News' barbs

"There's a see-ya-later-buddy quality to this."

-- Brit Hume, Fox News Channel anchor on the collapse of Iraq's regime

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TV pictures of Baghdad's fall included a U.S. soldier briefly draping an American flag over the head of a 40-foot statue of Saddam Hussein that was about to come down.

"No doubt, Al Jazeera and the others will make hay with that," "fair and balanced" Fox News Channel anchor David Asman said on Wednesday, expressing his disdain for the Qatar-based Arab satellite channel famous for its opinionated, non-Western news perspective.

When Fox reporter Simon Marks suggested from Amman, Jordan, that Arabs "on the street" may still regard Americans as invaders who manipulated these images, not as liberators, Asman snapped: "There is a certain ridiculousness to that point of view."

Whether he was right or wrong, the day's symbolism was historic on a level unrelated to politics or nationalism. When the statue of Hussein fell, an era of TV news appeared to topple with it.

There was a time, years ago, when even a network news anchor's raised eyebrow was correctly denounced as commentary. How quaint and musty that code of objectivity now seems as the war in Iraq winds down.

And viewers face Fox's swirling sands of spin.

Fox is not the only cable news channel that seamlessly stitches opinion to news. It happens regularly at CNN, the self-anointed "most trusted name in news," where prominent anchor Lou Dobbs is easily irked by opinions he doesn't share and is allowed to slap down interviewees who express them. And some of MSNBC's minions are not far behind.

Yet story slanting and bombast have soared stratospherically at Rupert Murdoch's 24-hour Fox channel under the guidance of former Republican political operative Roger Ailes since it was founded in 1996, ostensibly to combat bias in news. "Liberal" bias, that is.

Clearly, Fox is doing just fine in the eyes of many Americans, having passed older CNN in the ratings and made stars of some of its people.

A recent viewers poll by Murdoch-owned TV Guide found vamping, hyperventilating, tabloid-bred Shepard Smith, of all people, tied with ABC's Peter Jennings, just ahead of CBS' Dan Rather, for second place in network anchor credibility behind NBC's Tom Brokaw.

And that self-inflating gasbag Bill O'Reilly and his "O'Reilly Factor" are now something of a national institution. He is a real hoot, at times rising to exquisite self-parody, as when interviewing Princeton's Peter Singer, who equated the lives of slain Iraqi civilians with those of Americans fighting there.