Fox and Friends hosts Steve Doocey, Greta, and The Wang
The genius of Fox News lies in its insistence that it is not a propaganda network. It’s right there in the tagline: fair and balanced, a motto which Fox News staffers and on-air personalities obey with unshakable fidelity, as indicated by their smile-like facial grimaces above. Fox News is neither fair nor balanced. Its whole marketing strategy is to flaunt a conservative bias, which is a smart way to secure one of two demographics in the United States that continually feel persecuted by an imagined mainstream.* 
That’s clever, but what’s brilliant is the constant, monolithic insistence that the network is not just honest and ethical, but the only honest and ethical news source on television. It’s an audacious doubling down on a proposition that everyone, Fox fans and critics alike, knows is a lie. That makes it thrilling to the conservative faithful and infuriating to everybody else, with only old people and your barber in the middle. But today’s discussion is going to ignore the existence of those Fox News viewers who actually believe the network is fair and balanced, on the grounds that such people are too dumb to influence the physical universe, much less American culture. Evidence after the jump.