Last night, in an attempt to rebut White House communications director Anita Dunn's recent claim that Fox News "often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party," Fox News' Bill O’Reilly brought on Brit Hume as an expert on media bias (O'Reilly Factor, 10/12/09).

Hume claimed that Fox doesn’t feature "very many people who are down-the-line advocates for whatever the Republican party is up to," and that "the Republican party takes a fair amount of fairly sharp criticism on Fox News and has for a long time." Hume offered no evidence and ignored the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

And, though it is beside the point of whether or not Fox News is an arm of the GOP, Hume wheeled out Fox's old attack on the rest of the corporate media. Citing his pre-Fox career at outlets like ABC News, Hume told O’Reilly: "It wasn't that I couldn't report the news in the way that I saw fit. It was that I often had to argue for doing it a different way than the headlines on the front page of the New York Times seemed to direct the network coverage."

With bias experts like Hume, one might wonder if Fox would feature the Unabomber as an expert on domestic terrorism. Certainly no one can say that Hume didn't get to report the news the way he "saw fit" at Fox.

it sounds like the MRC was Fox News' wire service. They saved Fox the trouble of having to go out and make up the news by themselves.... But this isn't the first time a Foxian has revealed that they are in the employ of rightist ideologues:

• Fox anchor Jon Scott was caught reading directly from a Republican press release as though it were news.
• Rupert Murdoch admitted that he tried to shape public opinion on the war in Iraq.
• Murdoch also boasted that his Fox Business Network would be a more “business-friendly” network....
• In a revealing bit of staff development, George Bush hired Fox anchor Tony Snow to be his press secretary.

And, as a bonus bit "just added" by The Most Biased Name in News, Howard tells us that on March 23, "in an interview with NPR, Fox News VP Bill Shine blurted out that Fox is the 'voice of opposition.'"