History is complex, but cable news executives are not. One of the problems created by the sudden meteoric rise of FOX News was that it influenced the people at CNN and MSNBC that were hemorrhaging market share to them. It was quite natural for CNN and MSNBC producers to look at the success of FOX and then seek to emulate them. This, in combination with the climate of fear created by 9/11 and the Bush administration’s sales job for the invasion of Iraq, created a hard-right lurch in cable news coverage. Disentangling the causality…and the complicity of the news outlets in the era of Bushism is difficult. But we know it happened…and we know it had a very negative impact on our culture and the knowledge base of the electorate.

Others have documented the effect…FOX News watchers are the worst informed people in the country. They’re worse informed than people that don’t watch news programming at all. That is because FOX is in the game of disinformation. They spread lies. They truck in propaganda. And the other networks are only marginally better. Anyone that tells you that the media has a liberal bias has not been watching cable news…nor have they been reading the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

The country has traveled a long way since the year 2000…a long way in the wrong direction. There is an entire edifice that has been erected that stands in the way of our clawing our way out of the enormous hole we have dug for ourselves. And nowhere is that edifice more evident than in our mainstream media…the cable news…the Gang of 500…the Imus in the Morning show…the whole stinking rot of it all.

But the edifice is crumbling. It was so bound up with the culture of Bush and the culture of fear, that it was inevitable that it would come apart at the same time the Bush administration came apart.

Don Imus got himself in trouble for making racist, misogynistic statements. And you could see some of the Gang of 500, his regular guests (Howard Fineman, James Carville, Tom Oliphant) come running to his defense. This spectacle is a microcosm of what the Gang of 500 has been doing for the Bush administration ever since Iraq went sour and Katrina made landfall.

What Fineman said of Imus, could have been said by any member of the Gang of 500 about Bush and Cheney.

“You know, all of us who do your show, you know, we’re part of the gang. And we rely on you the way you rely on us.”

If this seems way too self-interested and way too incestuous…that is because it is. The administration needed bigfoot reporters like Judith Miller and Michael Gordon to sell their Iraq product. They needed opinion leaders like William Safire and Charles Krauthammer to spread the fear in a pseudo-intellectual way. And the reporters needed access…they needed material…they needed the Bushies.

And no one likes to see their country fail.

So…we’re in this big, deep, craterous hole. And the Bush administration is totally discredited. The DeLay/Frist GOP is in shambles. And the media has never looked worse. And now our critiques have currency.

When the Congressional Black Caucus Institute agreed to do a presidential nomination debate with FOX they thought they could get away with it. But they didn’t. First Edwards dropped out…then Obama…then Hillary. The rest of the candidates will surely follow. Why? Because FOX News is not a legitimate news organization. They are a propaganda outlet for the GOP. They dumb down the public, poison debate, stir up homophobia and xenophobia, tell religious people they are under attack, hype the threat of terrorism, instill fear, fear, fear…and push a rabidly pro-corporate agenda.

FOX has now lost two major debates (the other, for the Nevada caucuses). They are being marginalized. The pendulum is now swinging in the opposite direction, and soon the other cable news producers will be studying FOX News to see what they should avoid, not emulate.

Bushism is like a fever that seized our nation. The fever is breaking. We are truly making a difference. Not only have we provided an ample record for posterity that no…America was not uniformly suffering from ague, but we have chipped and chipped and chipped away at the edifice of fear and hatred and incestuous enabling that allowed our country to fall into such a state of shame and ineptitude and disrepute.

As Mellencamp said:

Some people ain’t no damn good

You can’t trust ’em, you can’t love em

No good deed goes unpunished

And I don’t mind being their whipping boy

I’ve had that pleasure for years and years

No, no I never was a sinner-tell me what else can I do

Second best is what you get-till you learn to bend the rules

Time respects no person-what you lift up must fall

They’re waiting outside-to claim my crumblin’ walls

Not a perfect analogy…but it’ll do.