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Is MSNBC worse than Fox News?

This is the quickest way to turn a pleasant dinner party into a shouting match: Posit that MSNBC is not as bad as Fox News, but rather worse than Fox News.

"How can you say that!? Fox News is practically an arm of the Republican party! Biased as MSNBC may be, it doesn't try to take an active role in presidential elections! It doesn't live in a choose-your-own-reality cocoon where the facts don't matter!"

The effort to defend MSNBC against comparisons to Fox News is always telling, because there was a time before MSNBC when liberals recoiled at the notion of agenda-driven programming in general. The acceptance of MSNBC was, like the acceptance of Super PACs, an acknowledgement that the rules on the ground had changed.

"I know it's biased, but how else to combat the misinformation on Fox!"... which is funny, because that's how Fox News started, as a counterbalance against perceived liberal biases in the mainstream media.

But here's the thing, and I hope it doesn't ruin your dinner: MSNBC is certainly as bad as Fox News, in terms of presenting ideologically biased information and demonizing the opposition. If you want to console yourself with the fact that Phil Griffin never tried to get someone to run for president, fine, you can have it.

In March, a Pew Research Center study -- yes, Pew -- found that 85 percent of MSNBC's programming is dedicated to "opinion," versus 15 percent that is dedicated to "news." Fox News dedicated just 55 percent of its programming to "opinion" and 45 percent to "news." (CNN dedicates 46 percent to "opinion" and 54 percent to "news.") During the 2012 election, the ratio of unfavorable to favorable treatment in stories on Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on MSNBC “was roughly 23-to-1; the negative-to-positive ratio on Fox News was 8-to-1.”

Ok, fine. But MSNBC's opinions are rooted in fact, whereas the Bill O'Reillys and Sean Hannitys willingly peddle misinformation!

But see, that's the thing. Many of MSNBC's opinions aren't rooted in fact. Many of them are rooted in unfounded speculation. Melissa Harris-Perry's recent claim that Obamacare is a racially loaded term conceived of "by a group of wealthy white men who needed a way to put themselves above and apart from a black man" is based on... what? The fact that the term was first used by a woman? The fact that, from Reaganomics to Hillarycare, we've always ascribed names to signature policies and legislation?

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. In a new essay for The National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke explains how MSNBC routinely demonizes the opposition to the point of absurdity:

“Biased” doesn’t cut it. To watch MSNBC for an afternoon is not so much to be given a slanted account of what is happening here in America, but instead to witness a series of discussions about current events in parallel America II... America II, as anyone who watches the channel will discover rather swiftly, hosts a supermajority of well-meaning multi-culti, progressive types whose foolproof plans for explosive economic growth, uniform social justice, and general human utopia are constantly being undone by a blossoming white-supremacist movement, split apart by neo-secessionists, and existentially threatened by traitors whose defining characteristic is a never-quite-explained hatred for progress. America II features no gray areas whatsoever: All local variation is apartheid, each and every identification requirement is the second coming of Jim Crow, all criticism of the government is sedition. It’s exhausting. ... Perhaps the most startling thing about the network is that one doesn’t need to even infer or twist anything in order to wallow in the gratifying stupefaction that its hosts just said what they just said.... But with MSNBC, no such mendacity is necessary. No clever editing. No false contexts. One can just read the transcripts. They meant to say that. ... After all, what would one possibly add to Martin Bashir’s suggestions that someone should defecate in Sarah Palin’s mouth, that conservatives are using the acronym “IRS” as a stand-in for “n***er,” or that Ted Cruz is the “David Koresh” of the Republican party? What could be achieved by sexing up Chris Matthews’s conviction that tea partiers “still count blacks as three-fifths” of a person, or that the perpetrators of 9/11 “just have a different perspective”? What might a worker bee charged with feeding the outrage machine do to make more impressive Joy Reid’s asseveration that Republicans are “resentful” of “post-1964 America,” or to improve upon Ed Schultz’s faith that “God supports Obamacare,” or to render more absurd Michael Eric Dyson’s contention that Eric Holder is “the chief lawgiver” and the “Moses of our time”?

For a display in extreme verbal calisthenics, ask an MSNBC type to defend these remarks. What you will witness is a slow crumbling of intellectual integrity, a defense that would never be offered on behalf of someone from the other side who practiced a similar flawed logic.

(WATCH - On Media: MSNBC leans backwards)

And that's the other thing: By now, an MSNBC defender reading this piece surely assumes I'm a pro-Fox News conservative. Because if you actually see America as America I and America II -- if you actually believe that every action taken against Obama's policies is inherently racist -- then you probably believe that I'm part of America II. Because, despite what Obama said in Boston in 2004, there are only two Americas: there's us and there's them, which leaves little room for independents.

One of the great media stories of the 21st century is the rise of MSNBC as a counterbalance to Fox News and a powerful platform for the progressive agenda -- an evolution that has done many great things for the Democratic party. The lesser told story is how the network, in a bid for ratings, repeatedly tempts its base away from the thing they had always prided themselves on when looking across the chasm at the conservative echo-chamber: facts.