After the surprise victory by Christine O’Donnell in the GOP senate primary in New Hampshire, her role model, Sarah Palin, visited Bill O’Reilly to offer the candidate some advice on dealing with the press and her own staff, who O’Reilly asserts are keeping her off of his program:
“So she’s going to have to learn that, yes, very quickly. She’s going to have to dismiss that, go with her gut, get out there, speak to the American people. Speak through FOX News.“
The spectacle of Palin, a Fox News employee, offering her analysis that O’Donnell should “speak through Fox News” is a perfect illustration of the built in bias that is at the heart of Fox News. Palin inadvertently let slip the fact that Fox is the PR arm of the Republican Party and that Republicans should be taking full advantage of that (not that they didn’t already know).
Try to imagine someone like correspondent Lara Logan advising Democratic candidates to speak through CBS News. For that matter, try to imagine any network news correspondent with a role remotely similar to Palin’s at Fox. In addition to her network duties, Palin actively campaigns for GOP candidates, raises funds for the party and affiliated advocacy groups, and is herself a potential candidate for office.
Palin is not alone at Fox as a partisan player. Former Fox News host John Kasich is presently running for governor of Ohio. Former, and possibly future, presidential candidate Mike Huckabee currently hosts his own Fox show. Contributors Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Andrea McGlowan, have all been, or are considering being, GOP candidates for office.
Fox News is the place where Republicans go to nurture their political aspirations. They are the farm team for the GOP. And now Sarah Palin has admitted it in public.
O’Donnell does not want to go on air with Loofa Bill. She is a young earth creationist and once defended Gingrich by asking why then President Clinton wasn’t on trial for killing Vince Foster (h/t to TPM). O’Reilly would be predisposed to confront her on the masturbation theme (though he wouldn’t raise it from an openly opposing viewpoint) and he would attack her on other issues in his self aggrandizing way: “Now look, I was as disgusted as anyone with the Clinton presidency and my record shows that. But you said he was a murderer. You don’t really believe that do you? I mean, really?”