Bill O'Reilly

Fox News anchor BIll O'Reilly. Photograph: AP

Bill O'Reilly finally lifted the veil of silence that has shrouded the hacking scandal involving News Corporation, which owns Fox News. It is unclear why he waited until Tuesday, (the same day that Rupert Murdoch had to eat humble pie during a British parliamentary investigation) to finally mention the scandal that has dominated coverage on every other major network. Perhaps he felt compelled to respond to a memo released by the watchdog group Media Matters, which O'Reilly to uphold his oft-stated commitment to "independence" from News Corp's influence or perhaps the anchor was concerned that he could jeopardize his status as "the most trusted political reporter in America" if he failed to even acknowledge a major news story just because it involves the company he works for.

Anyway, whatever his reasons, he finally decided that avoiding the issue was not going to make the story go away.

He got an update on the status quo from Fox News correspondent Amy Kellogg and while he did acknowledge that the story was pretty big and "is going up and up and up" all the way to David Cameron and that the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone was " the kind of thing that will anger folks", he still thought that the scandal was mostly a British problem that the US media are making too much of.

He took up this point with Dr Nile Gardiner, a former assistant to Margaret Thatcher and senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think

tank.

You know look, people are exploiting this situation. It is a bad situation, anyone who broke the law should be held responsible. Everybody knows that. Journalists are citizens too. We break the law, we should be held responsible for it. But here in the United States there isn't any intrusion of this story thus far on News Corp properties, none! Yet you have the New York Times absolutely running wild with the story, front page, front page, front page, column, column, column, vicious stuff and ah it's all ideological! Is it now?

Actually there is quite a bit of intrusion by News Corp properties in the United States into the story. O'Reilly may have missed the New

York Times article detailing an enormous $655 million payout News Corp made on behalf of News America Marketing, its in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, "to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away."

He may also have missed the disturbing news that News Corporation has

hired Brendan V. Sullivan, Jr, who the New York Times describes as "one of the most aggressive criminal defense lawyers in the country" in response to the FBI opening an investigation into suspected hacking

into the telephones of 9/11 victims and their families. Still, O'Reilly and Gardiner seems to believe that any bad behaviour by News Corp staff was due to their British people and that so far "there's not one American employee implicated in any of this."

Michael Savage

Michael Savage in a recording studio in California. Photograph: John Storey/AP

Michael Savage is not a Fox News employee so he has been free to wax lyrical about the News Corp scandal since the story broke. He has been a little conflicted about whose side he is on, however. He's not a fan of News Corp since they no longer invite him to appear on Fox News, but he's also not a fan of Britain, because he has been banned from entering the country. Since the foam pie incident, however, his

sympathies seemed to lie firmly in Murdoch's camp.

I couldn't believe what I watched, the kangaroo court of them left wing in England, the Stalinist inquisition, the vermin of the

Labour party, people who never in their life never created one job, just like in this country with the Democrats. The left wing never creates jobs and yet they're attacking a man who employs 53,000 people around the world.

He made it clear, however, that he is not condoning the hacking scandal but he bemoans the priorities of the English who seem to favour attacking job creators like Murdoch, and radio hosts like Savage, instead of targeting the real enemy, which seems to include anyone whose political ideology is left of centre and radical Islamists who want to introduce Sharia law to Britain.

He also thought that it reflected very badly on the British Empire that it took a Chinese woman (Murdoch's wife Wendi) to defend the 80-year-old mogul against a shaving foam attack.

I look at this and if that's not a metaphor for England today a country that cannot defend itself against a pie thrower, let alone against radical Muslim terrorists. This is an amazing story we saw today!

His other concern about the scandal is that he himself is somehow at the heart of it because of revelations that Gordon Brown, who was prime minister when Savage was banned from Britain, was once friends with Murdoch.

Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity has not broken his vow of silence on the scandal involving his employers. He has plenty to say, however, about bad behaviour in the liberal media and devoted several segments this week to remarks made on the HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher about Republicans in general and Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman in particular.

He played a clip of some of the highlights which included Maher saying that "Bachmann's not a mean girl, she's just a crazy girl with mean ideas", that it was scary to think "someone wants to be president who hears God talking to her. He also said the reason liberals don't like Palin or Bachmann is simply because they are "crazy people." It has nothing to do with the fact that "they have breasts, but that they are boobs." Maher also said that charges of sexism will not prevent him from pointing out that Bachmann is "a dangerous nincompoop" and that Palin is "a vainglorious braggard, a liar, a whiner, a professional victim, a scold, a know it all, a jizzler, a bully who sells patriotism like a pimp."

Hannity was so horrified by Maher's statements that he abandoned his network's fair and balanced principles temporarily and opted instead to only discuss the matter with guests who agreed with his point of view; Jedediah Bila, a conservative commentator and Andrea Tantaros, a Fox News host.

I've been through this with Bill Maher, I don't want him fired. He can say whatever he wants. Here's, I guess what we have to examine here is this double standard because it now is so over the top, it's so vicious, it's so mean, it's so cruel and I don't hear this coming from conservatives about liberals!

His guests agree that a conservative would never speak so ill of a liberal and then they proceed to lay in to Maher, saying that he's an insecure man who exemplifies the "ugly side of the far left", and that he is a "nincompoop but he's not dangerousl, just an angry guy looking for attention."

They were also upset that the National Organization for Woman (NOW) has not come out in defence of Palin and Bachman (at least to their specifications), and they alleged that this was because they are not pro-choice.

While it is true that both Palin and Bachmann are staunchly anti-abortion and have called for the immediate and complete defunding of Planned Parenthood, an organisation that millions of mostly poor American women rely on for gynecological exams and cancer screenings, NOW has made it clear via a blog post by communications director, Lisa Bennett, that they do not condone sexist attacks on women in the media, but that their primary focus is to defend all women, conservative and liberal, from the "onslaught of reproductive rights attacks and other threats to our freedom."

Apparently this did not meet Hannity's standards for an out-and-out condemnation and he felt obliged to devote more segments to this issue, which might explain why he has not yet had time to address the scandal involving News Corp.