Fair and…Balanced?

Well, there’s good news and bad news. I was watching Fox, in anticipation of Bush’s live speech to the Australian parliament.

They cut to the parliament, but as PM Howard started to speak, they focused on President Bush’s face, illuminating his expression as the PM introduced him, without a camera on Mr. Howard.

Then, they cut away to an inane discussion between Hannity and Colmes, and Laura Ingraham and (shudder) Democrat hack Vic Camber, at which point they finally cut to a video of the PM’s speech, but with no audio, so that no one could any longer even hear the intro.

When the Bush speech finally commenced, they finally cut back to it (though not until after Laurie Dhue’s half-past newswrap). It was a good speech (except for the repeated use of the pronunciation “nookyalur”–is there no way to break him of this, or does no one in the White House care?), made all the better by two interruptions from leftist Senators, to which his response to the second was “I love free speech.”

That’s actually the bad news, so from that relative perspective, perhaps there’s no good news.

Of course, the worse news (which makes Fox look much better in contrast), is that neither of the other two American cable news channels (MSNBC and CNN) interrupted their programming for any coverage at all…