Prefacing a Daily Show segment (3/4/09) with his version of current big-media reporting: "Recent opinion polls indicate that six weeks into Barack Obama's administration, the American public thinks they approve of his performance--but it turns out they're wrong," Jon Stewart runs clips of celebrity news figures like Fox's Sean Hannity asking, "How did the market react to this latest liberal spending spree? Well, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped almost 400 points," and of Fox Business Network's Neil Cavuto asking, "The Dow is down more than 1,500 points, nearly 3,000 since Election Day, now is this a vote of no confidence in this administration?" Mocking this common media canard, Stewart even calls the Dow

a real-time cause-and-effect precision barometer of how the president is doing. It's been that way for years. For example--little-known fact--Wall Street hated Ronald Reagan: Look at the numbers the day he got inaugurated. And they hated it when Truman announced we'd won World War II. And, to give you an idea of what a finely tuned measure of America's national mood the Dow is, when the Titanic sunk? Through the roof!

Stewart's take-away moral: "So what seems to be being suggested here is that opinion polls don't matter; the stock market is the only rational, objective indicator of a commander in chief's performance." Read the contrary evidence in FAIR's new Media Advisory: "What the Dow Isn't: Stocks Misused As 'Scorecard' of White House Policy" (3/5/09).

Keeping tabs on the "Fair and Balanced" network, Mark Howard (News Corpse, 3/2/09) details how

last year, prior to the election, Fox News was already fortifying its right flank. New multimillion dollar contracts were handed out to Roger Ailes, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. Hannity's show shed the dead weight of alleged liberal Alan Colmes. Glenn Beck was brought in to shore up the daytime crowd. Neil Cavuto, a bully who is every bit as obnoxious as O'Reilly poisons the economic news, and he is also managing editor of Murdoch's Fox Business News. And just this week Bill Sammon, author of a shelf full of bitterly partisan books, was promoted to VP and Washington editor for the network.

The result is a full-court press of some of the dirtiest political assaults ever waged by what is advertised as a "news" network. Fox News is shamelessly pushing a campaign to characterize Obama as a socialist--a committed opponent of America and its values--from 6:00 am with the crew of Fox & Friends, to after midnight with broadcasts and repeats of their primetime neanderthal shoutcasters.

Howard even reminds us that, as usual, "they get their marching orders directly from Rupert Murdoch who last September said that… "[Obama's] policy is really very, very naive, old fashioned, 1960s socialist."