The Chicken Little Henhouse and Fox News

I'm as troubled as most thinking people are about the yellow journalism style that has become respectable mainstream reporting. Fox News is the standard bearer, but by no means the only one. Calls for a return to the "Fairness Doctrine" reflect this growing unease among liberal intellectuals. The problem with those regulations is that they bump up hard against free speech, one of the liberal absolutes. It is an absolute that I hold to even as I want to muzzle or at least restrain the spew on cable. But lately, I have had the feeling that the fable of Chicken Little will prove once again that the wisdom of the ages is found in simple and timeless stories. Fox may have the highest ratings on cable, but I predict that their constant hysterical yammerings about insignificant side-issues and their twisting of fact to get a rise out of viewers will result in a loss of power for the network and put them back on the margins of the public discourse where such antics belong.