Slate Says “Fox News Admits Bias!”

Slate quotes Scott Norvell, the Fox News London bureau chief, in a May 20 editorial in Wall Street Journal Europe:

“Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally, and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly. And those who hate us can take solace in the fact that they aren’t subsidizing Bill’s bombast; we payers of the BBC license fee don’t enjoy that peace of mind. Fox News is, after all, a private channel and our presenters are quite open about where they stand on particular stories. That’s our appeal. People watch us because they know what they are getting. The Beeb’s institutionalized leftism would be easier to tolerate if the corporation was a little more honest about it.”

Timothy Noah concludes that Fox is admitting its bias: “I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to compare Norvell’s op-ed to the Vatican’s belated admission, after 359 years, that Galileo had it right when he said the earth revolved around the sun.” But isn’t it clear that Norvell is exaggerating about feeding scraps to Karl Rove?

> Update: 4:26pm: The Guardian has the BBC’s response (regreq).