I'm about to launch into US politics and media, but bear with me, because it's relevant to us. Shit runs downhill, and when America gives us a Global Financial Crisis, we all suffer. When they start a war, we inevitably follow, and the whole world reaps the whirlwind. What's happening in the US is scary, because, unless we wake up to ourselves, we'll follow down the same track.

There’s been a lot of spittle flying about lately. The American Right are very upset that the White House has had the gall to call Fox News what it is, or more correctly, what it is not, and By Christ are they letting us all know how upset they are. “Fair and Balanced” is FN’s callsign, and White House spokespeople have taken the brave (for Washington, at least) step of saying that it is anything but. Fox News no longer, if it ever really did, reports on the news, it pushes an agenda.

Now there’s nothing wrong with a media outlet expressing opinions – this is why I read both Quadrant and Dissent, for example. One is left-wing, the other right-wing, but that’s beside the point; they aren’t marketing themselves as newspapers, they publish opinion. This is why I don’t really care what Andrew Bolt has to say, no matter how offensive and ill-argued his point may be, it’s his point, it’s his opinion – I know he writes opinion pieces, he doesn’t pretend to be a reporter.

When I open the newspaper (and after I’ve thrown out all the vacuous advertorials and “lifestyle/fashion” sections), I look to the News section for reportage on local and overseas news, then I turn to the Opinion section for, you guessed it, opinions. Fox News used to blur the line between the two, now there’s just no line at all.

A couple of elections back, Fox News ran a “John Kerry – How French Is He?” campaign. Lately they’ve run the Tea Party campaign, and it was Fox, not the GOP, that lit the fires and kept them burning well-bright around Obama’s healthcare plan, doing its best to promote the “mandatory abortions and euthanasia” line. They run push polls and dutifully report that x% of Americans believe the Healthcare Plan will cost too much for ordinary Americans.

(It’s an interesting one, health. The US spends twice as much per capita on health than any other industrialised nation, but in terms of infant mortality and preventable disease, America comes in 37th. Two thirds of personal bankruptcies are due to medical bills, but what makes that even worse is that over three quarters of those people had health insurance when they fell ill!)

Fox no longer reports news, it tries to make it. There’s a lot of media out there doing just this (see Luke T’s take on this on page 10), but Fox actively runs campaigns in one direction and one only: they hate the Democrats, and the entire network is dedicated to bringing them down by whatever means possible.

Get onto youtube and have a look at Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck. They used to be just funny, if wildly offensive, and made the rest of the network seem reasonable by comparison.

I really can’t do justice to Beck and O’Reilly, but I’ll give you just a couple of examples. Beck has decided that Obama is a fan of Chairman Mao, so he proves this by putting a picture of Obama next to a picture of Mao. He dresses it up as deep analysis by then inserting between them some photos of “liberal” (oh, the venom with which they say ‘liberal’ – you can just see them wishing there was an “s” or two in it so they could really spit it out) politicians and public figures, then stands back proudly and says “See? That’s how they do it! That’s how they hide Obama’s love of Chairman Mao from you.”

Another Beck beauty was when he made an impassioned plea to “all good journalists” out there to stand up for poor little Fox, comparing the White House’s “attack” on Fox News with “when they came for the Jews, I didn’t stand up, because I wasn’t a Jew, then when they came for me, there was no one left…”

O’Reilly is the charming creature who, several years ago now, had as a guest a teenager whose father had died in the Twin Towers. The kid came on to say that maybe war, particularly the invasion of Iraq, wasn’t such a great idea. O’Reilly spent about ten minutes screaming at him such things as “You’re trampling on your father’s memory, he’d be ashamed of you”, then just cut the kid’s mic off.

These two, along with Hannity and the others, are so far out on the lunar right they’d be hysterically funny if one didn’t keep remembering that there are, literally, shitloads of people who watch, and listen, and agree wholeheartedly. More disturbing, though, is the fact that the rest of the network is catching up to them when it comes to wingnut-ness; events that don’t suit Fox’s Far Right agenda (such as a massive Gay Rights rally) simply don’t get reported, and Congress reporting is done solely from the Republican side. Fox has almost joined Rush Limbaugh as the philosophical heart of the Republican Party; having pretty much scared its moderate supporters off to Obama, the GOP is going way way down the loony trail, following Fox’s lead.

It’s easy to sit back as liberals, laughing our arses off when Jon Stewart and the rest hoist Fox’s loons on their own petards, but the fact is, a lot of people watch Fox, and agree with it, and a lot of them are in Congress, and the Senate, and setting policy within the Republican Party.

Unfortunately, a lot of people watch Fox News and actually believe that it’s a news channel, and still believe that it’s Fair And Balanced. This is why the White House has said enough is enough.

The Republican party hates Obama and will do everything it can to thwart his program and bring him down; that’s fine, that’s their job. If Fox wants to be a part of that, then good luck to them, they just have to give up the right to call themselves News.

I’d also like to ask a question of all the Australian commentators from the Right who are bagging Obama’s White House for daring to stand up to Fox, calling him thin-skinned and so on. Hasn’t the Australian Right, for years now, been waging a concerted campaign against the ABC for its perceived bias? Every time Aunty ran a story that wasn’t openly cheerleading for the government it was accused of bias, and yet another Liberal hack was appointed to the board, another enquiry was run (finding no bias), and yet still the Liberals whined. Why is Obama thin-skinned, yet you were justified?

You may be wondering why any of this matters; American politics are a long way removed from ours, and it’s not as if we have any lunatics like Beck or O’Reilly in Australia, at least not with that level of influence. But this actually does matter. The combination of the Global Financial Crisis and the crushing defeat of the Republicans last November have led to a changing of the guard on the Right. Rather than try to win back the middle ground they lost through the war-mongering, the rape of the environment and wholesale corporate theft that signified the Bush years, the Right in America has turned Far Right, and this is why Fox News is so influential, peddling its paranoia and hate.

Throughout Europe, ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi parties are starting to gain traction, because the disenfranchised and angry, having spent so many years being slightly appeased by Bush’s War on Moozies, have nowhere else to turn. So when a “social democrat” government becomes soiled by a scandal or a crisis and a change of government is due, they won’t get another Sarkozy, they’ll get another Le Pen. This is my fear for Australia.

We have a Right wing, and its slow, ugly crawl toward xenophobia and fear can be seen in some of the recent utterings of Wilson Tuckey and Sharman Stone. As our Dear Leader tries to play tough on asylum seekers, witness the re-emergence of Phillip Ruddock and Kevin Andrews, let off the leash from the back benches to squawk the same kind of fear-mongering racist dog-whistling that won Howard the election in 2001.

Our country (I hope) has moved on from all of that, but while Rudd extends his sacred Middle Ground to spread both Right and Left, the conservatives either have to dance to his tune, which is not the job of an Opposition, or they have to swing further in the direction of the Far Right, which does not bode well for the rest of us.

I’m happy that the Coalition are in opposition, and I’m happy for them to be an Opposition – every government needs an alternative government sitting in the wings ready to take over. But what kind of alternative will we be left with if the Liberals follow the line of the Republican Fox Party?

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