Shock horror.

I suspect that most of you have noticed by now that I'm a little sceptical when it comes to politics, media, business and so on. I've certainly never made any efforts to hide my scorn for the grossly colluded crap that the public is served in the name of "News".

I've long considered Fox to be amongst the worst offenders when it comes to media distortion. Murdoch is... well... a vile, odious and frankly dangerous little piece of shit, and his willingness to leap into bed with anything that will advance his power and influence -- corporations, governments, organisations, anything -- seems genuinely limitless.

So I wasn't really surprised to discover that last year, Fox managed to sleaze a Florida appeals court into accepting that the First Amendment gave them the right to present material they knew to be false as if it were true. The FCC rulings against distortion and falsehood were dismissed as 'guidelines' rather than legal requirements, and therefore not a fit matter for a court to rule upon.

During their appeal, FOX asserted that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media. They argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves.

Stunning, huh? It's OK for the news to be complete bullshit.

This story, unsurprisingly, was one of the most censored news items of 2003/04. You can read the whole article here.

You might also be interested to go have a look at the entire Top 25 Censored Stories of 2003/04.