I made the point yesterday that Fox News has opinionists — pundits — and also straight, or straighter, news. And bless the network that understands the difference: the difference between news and opinion, or news and partisan attacks. On CNN, the anchorman Anderson Cooper was interviewing David Gergen. This was at the time the ?tea party? protests began. Gergen was saying that Republicans needed to find their voice. Cooper responded, smirkingly, ?It?s hard to talk when you?re teabagging.?

According to the Urban Dictionary, ?teabagging? is ?the insertion of one man?s sac[] into another person?s mouth.?

Well, CNN has opinionists, too — though when your anchorman is Anderson Cooper, do you really need opinionists? This morning, I thought of a CNN moment that a lot of us wrote about at the time. A host, D. L. Hughley, said that the 2008 Republican convention was like Nazi Germany. He said, ?It literally looked like Nazi Germany. It really did.?

It really did. Never forget that CNN is a real news network, and Fox an unreal, or fake, or illegitimate one. The Obama White House tells you that. Never forget it, never.

P.S. I don?t much care whether CNN has comedians saying the Republicans are Nazis. To be a Republican — certainly a conservative — is to be called a Nazi almost as a matter of routine. But could the CNN types stop whining about Fox? Get off their high horses about Fox? That?s the bothersome thing: the clueless hypocrisy (although if hypocrisy is clueless, is it genuinely hypocrisy? To be taken up later . . .).

 

Look, the great sin of Fox News is it broke the monopoly of the liberal media.

 

That's the reason why it is so wildly successful. I once said years ago that the genius of Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch is to have discovered a niche audience of American broadcast news, namely, half of the American people.

 

And the other consequence is that it angers the Obama administration, which is used to, particularly after last year, wall-to-wall adulation.

 

I mean, this is almost comical if you look at the lineup. On the one hand, in the tank are NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, PBS, CNN and MSNBC. Some of these like MSNBC are so in the tank they need scuba gear. Some of them occasionally emerge for a breath of air, but only occasionally.

 

And Fox stands up and refuses to bend a knee, and that's what they can't stand.

 

Look, CNN was patted on the head by the Obama administration as objective. CNN is an organization that a few weeks ago had a fact-checking on a "Saturday Night Live" skit that was mildly critical of Obama, but did no fact checking on wildly, grotesquely, libelous racist statements allegedly made by Rush Limbaugh which were not made by Rush Limbaugh.

 

?That's not a matter of sloppiness. That's a matter of ideology.