Fox News has been accused of being a house organ of the Republican party, though that's not entirely accurate. It follows the mostly conservative "what can you do for ME" ideology of its owner, Rupert Murdoch, with a bit of the faux-populist anti-elite Nixonian media strategy of Roger Ailes, its initial guiding force. But lately, cracks and strains have become evident. The network doesn't particularly like John McCain, the Republican nominee. And Rupert Murdoch seems to have developed a little crush on Barack Obama, the Democrat. But the network's airheaded personalities just aren't comfortable embracing the black guy with the funny name. The cognitive dissonance leads, over and over again, to terribly offensive slurs followed by half-hearted apologies. Let us examine the worst of their crimes!

Fox News had commentator Michelle Malkin on to talk about how Barack Obama's wife Michelle has not been the victim of unfair conservative attacks, and as she was speaking the network displayed the caption seen above: "Outraged liberals: Stop picking on Obama's baby mama!" The term "baby mama" is, of course, slang for the unwed mother of one's child (married ones usually just called "wives"). This is sort of like when Anderson Cooper of CNN misused the term "boo," except vicious and racist instead of adorable and funny. It also follows incidents in which Fox asked whether Michelle Obama did a "terrorist" fist-bump with her husband and in which it circulated unsubstantiated rumors that she used the term "whitey" in a speech once. Whoops! Fox News has "accidentally" injected another crazy defacto allegation about the Democratic presidential candidate's wife into the mainstream dialog. Disingenuous semi-apology to follow shortly. (UPDATE: Already happened.) Video after the jump.

The Post's efforts to slam Keith Olbermann are getting increasingly desperate. In its latest attempt to lash the MSNBC personality on behalf of owner Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. comrade-in-arms Bill O'Reilly, who are in a feud with the Countdown host, the tabloid somehow managed to work an Olbermann dig into a story about bad gym behavior. Well, actually, not into the copy of the story itself, but into the accompanying infographic, pictured above. It's an awkward enough dig to make one miss Olbermann's Rupert-Murdoch-as-a-pirate imitation. [Post]

One of Bill O'Reilly's slimy little producers tried to ambush PBS veteran newsman Bill Moyers at the National Conference for Media Reform yesterday, demanding to know why he wouldn't come on O'Reilly's silly Fox News shout-fest. Moyers turned the tables, demanding that O'Reilly set him up with an interview with Fox overlord Rupert Murdoch so that Murdoch can explain why we still haven't gotten the $20-per-barrel oil his network promised at the start of the war. And other things. See the exchange below.

Looking for a decent excuse to advance his long-simmering feud with Rupert Murdoch and to do a weird Australian/pirate accent, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann seized upon the words of a former News Corp. insider, who claimed in one of our posts this morning that Murdoch fired Jane Friedman from HarperCollins because she canned powerhouse publisher Judith Regan in late 2006, and also because she squashed Regan's OJ Simpson book project. The source also claimed, tangentially and outlandishly, that Fox News chief Roger Ailes will soon be fired as well for his own role in the Simpson book fiasco. Predictably, this amused Olbermann to no end. For the crime of going to bat for the OJ book, Olbermann named Murdoch today's "worst person in the world," an honor previously bestowed to Fox News screamer Bill O'Reilly. He then did a killer Murdoch imitation that will surely put to rest those allegations that he's totally crazy. Clip after the jump.

The rumor that the Republican Party has a tape of Michelle Obama railing against "whitey" in Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church apparently surfaced two weeks ago on No Quarter, a blog operated by Larry Johnson, a self-described former CIA analyst and supporter of Obama's Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton. No evidence has emerged to corroborate the wild rumor, but Fox News went ahead and aired the charges on camera today. The justification?

Jane Clark, the former Fox News employee who is now suing the company that managed the network's bedbug-infested headquarters, had a press conference today where she showed off the results of her vicious multiple bitings at the hands of the bloodthirsty insects. Take heed, potential Fox News guests: this may be the fate that awaits you! Two more graphic photos of Clark's welt-ridden neck, after the jump.

Google has turned us all into monetizable micromarkets. An ad for everyone, and everyone in an ad. the New York Post is now advertising against the keyword "Rachel Marsden" on Google to attract readers. If you're asking "Marsden who?", then you've gotten the point already. Marsden, the Canadian political commentator (and Valleywag commenter), is best known for having been dumped by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia. Current Post readers are no doubt more interested in her reportedly unceremonious exit from the Fox News show Red Eye. What this ad buy tells us: That the Post thinks it can profit from attracting the small number of people who have heard enough about Marsden to search on her name. And that if Marsden is worth advertising against in Google's frictionless marketplace, every last one of us is next.

The victims of the Fox News bedbug infestation are fighting back! Former Fox employee Joan Clark has filed a lawsuit claiming that she has post-traumatic stress disorder from being attacked by bedbugs multiple times at the Fox News headquarters. She says she was bitten by the voracious creatures last October, last November, and just last month. She even claims that her entire department was relocated in a futile attempt to escape the bloodsucking insects! The building owner and maintenance company are named in the lawsuit, and Clark has filed a Worker's Comp claim against News Corp. itself. The full press release detailing her suit is below. We've contacted Fox (which may already be planning its revenge) and Clark's lawyer's for further info. THIS STORY IS FAR FROM OVER.

Fox News correspondent Liz Trotta said on air this weekend that she'd like to try and kill Barack Obama now that Hillary Clinton has wussed out on her comments about Obama's impending, Robert Kennedy-style death. Trotta started to talk about the idea of an "Osama" assassination, then corrected herself, saying "Osama, Obama — well, both, if we could." Then the former Washington Times bureau chief laughed like a brainwashed Moonie assassin. Trotta apologized in a later broadcast for her "lame attempt at humor," adding, "it is a very colorful political season." Immediately prior to the apology, Trotta had just spent a few minutes pontificating about Clinton on-camera again, because she isn't fired, because Fox News stands behind their crazy talking heads. After the jump, a clip with both the assassination comment and the apology.

Fox News praises post-feminist site Jezebel for taking a "firm moral position."

Rupert Murdoch's handmaidens over at the New York Post this morning jumped into a feud between their Fox News shouting head Bill O'Reilly and MSNBC ranter Keith Olbermann. The tabloid's gossip page ran an item dredging up various minor controversies involving Olbermann dating back to his ESPN days, up through an alleged spat between Olbermann and fellow MSNBC personality David Gregory last Tuesday over camera time. It then insinuated Olbermann might soon explode and leave his network. The warmed-over gossip was clearly meant as cover fire on behalf of O'Reilly, a fellow News Corp. soldier, whose feud with Olbermann is detailed in the Washington Post today. In a nutshell:

A reporter from England's Telegraph is explaining The Colbert Report to his countrymen today. "The Colbert Report is news parody of the first order. The show's titular host offers a funhouse-mirror reflection of the bellicose Right-wing opinionisers of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News channel (among others) who dominate and dictate the political discourse in the States with lengthy and obnoxious opinion-slots that are somehow passed off as 'news'."

On his show last night, Bill O'Reilly addressed the hubub over his old "Do it now!" meltdown, which has resurfaced on the internet. The Fox News host approached the topic with a sense of humor — how else could he play this, really, without looking like the same angry guy he was in the dated clip? — but also very briefly, and without the actual, unflattering footage. But O'Reilly did slip in an interesting, probably not entirely untrue joke about how he's had annual explosions since he joined Fox. And he offered to sell them. Someone, please, take this man at his word and at least try to buy some previously unseen footage, so we can all laugh some more with Bill about how charming and unharmful his on-camera rages really are.

Yeah, you already knew Fox News host Bill O'Reilly could be a volcanic asshole on camera, because he explodes at people all the time. But it's still fun to watch O'Reilly thoroughly lose his shit in this old clip from his Inside Edition days, which resurfaced on the Web tonight. You have to feel for whatever poor soul wrote the script for O'Reilly's teleprompter. Video — including the exclamation "Fuck it! Do it live!" — after the jump.

Fox News will always have its revenge! Back in March, news of a bedbug infestation in Fox's newsroom surfaced, and the huge PR firm Fleishman-Hillard took advantage of it to promote one of their pest control clients—offering a free de-lousing to any Fox guests. You just knew that Fox wouldn't let that insult slide. Today, the fair and balanced station got its on-air vengeance against the PR firm [PRNewser], with a little of Fox's trademark gratuitous humiliation:

Fox News's 3 a.m. time-slot filler Greg Gutfeld has an interview with TVNewser coming up that is sure to be chock-full of quotable lines. Like Gutfeld calling his show Red Eye "the most subversive, surreal piece of programming ever to be on TV." You, sir, have apparently never caught Unbeatable Banzuke. Greg will also take on HuffPo, Gawker, the magazine industry, and "politically correct media." We're sure he has very SHOCKING and CONTROVERSIAL opinions on all of those things. Cutest part of the interview excerpt posted so far is when Greg says Fox pushed him from the semi-reasonable 2 a.m. slot to the desolate 3 a.m. slot because the network needed "more political coverage." We're all big fans of Fox News's award-winning 2 a.m. election updates! [TVNewser]

It's obvious why Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want to go on Fox News all of a sudden. They're trying to reach white male swing voters, and those voters tend to watch Fox. But why is the conservative cable news network so eager to cede airtime to these bleeding heart lefties? That would be because of ratings. For some strange reason, Fox News viewers are suddenly very interested in the Democratic primaries, even though they shouldn't care because Republican candidate John McCain has already promised to continue many of the glorious Bush Administration policies they've heard so much about on Fox News. This has led to some, uh, changes:

Grand Theft Auto IV is not so much the apotheosis of modern console entertainment as the first post-modern video game. While it provides the usual bloody entertainment, the latest installment of Rockstar's hit title is also a fully-imagined alternate world-complete with a witty satire of 21st century media. Serbian hardman Niko Bellic, the game's central character, can browse a self-mocking version of photo sharing site Flickr ("perfect for hopeless losers who like to spend days categorizing, alphabetizing and organizing their online galleries") and scour the missed connections on Liberty City's craplist.net ("sorry for checking out your 13-year-old daughter"). Most absurd of all are the mock cable shows-though they contend with their real-world equivalents. The newscasters of Weasel News are even more rabid than Bill O'Reilly and his colleagues at Fox News. If you have a friend with a Playstation, get them to show you I'm Rich, a celebrity show which in this episode profiles a cocaine heiress called Chloe Parker and as absurd as Paris Hilton. A campy British narrator-resembling that of the Daily Show's John Oliver-provides the voiceover.

"Tony Snow, who worked at the Fox News Channel for 10 years before serving as the Bush administration’s chief spokesman for 17 months, is moving to CNN to be a political contributor." [Times]