My friend Harvey was kind enough to forward this one to me. It's by Slate's media critic Jack Schafer and analyzes Fox News from the perspective offered in an Atlantic Monthly article on talk radio.
An excerpt:
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Written by novelist David Foster Wallace, the piece profiles the tribulations and techniques of KFI-AM evening talker John Ziegler. As immersive a work of feature journalism as you'll read these days, the 22,500-word article breaks the talk-radio formula down to its constituent elements and annotates them—literally, via dozens of footnotes, a Wallace trademark. Although Wallace doesn't make the link directly, it's obvious that Fox News Channel and its imitators have incorporated many of talk radio's basic lessons into their architecture.
Wallace could be writing about Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity when he explains that KFI's Ziegler "is not a journalist—he is an entertainer. Or maybe it's better to say that he is part of a peculiar, modern, and very popular type of news industry, one that manages to enjoy the authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved." These radio and cable entertainers do precisely what they damn Mainstream Media reporters for doing: They "interpret, analyze, and explain" news inside their narrow political context.