Why Fox bugs the left.

Peggy Noonan on why the left hates Fox News so excessively:

It is an odd thing about modern liberals that they're made anxious by the unsanctioned. A conservative is more likely to see what's happening as freedom. It isn't that honest and impartial news lost its place of respect, it's that establishment liberalism lost its journalistic monopoly. And it was a monopoly.

They also distrust anything that makes money. NPR isn't really all that free from commercials. It just trades on its image of being "listener supported," an odd distortion of the word "public."

Ms. Noonan goes on to lament the loss of standards as the entertainment side of the media seeks ratings with ever more titillating and sophomoric "product." I'm afraid to say that it has been ever thus. We don't really have a sense of the kind of dreck that previous working classes considered entertainment. What has endured is what the upper middle and upper classes valued. What we have today is smeared across all audiences. We no longer have to buy seats at the Met. The frivolity comes to all of us by TV and Radio for free. The markets that have made our prosperity so widespread have also promoted the lowest forms of culture. C'est la vie.