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Good post. The humorlessness, however, comes from the fact that CNN fancies itself to be like the network news divisions which all emphasize being boring as an asset. This boringness comes through in wording (always picking haughty sounding words), story selection, etc. Fox News suceeds, in one sense, because it realizes that viewers dislike this pretentious attitude.

Your point about liberal television being more boring because it is not (usually) written with activist language is right, though. This fact is what causes people like Eric Alterman to assert that there few large news organizations are liberal. In a way, it's correct. There really are more outlets devoted to giving the conservative perspective of the news than liberal ones.

But what Alterman and those who think like him fail to understand is that just because a media outlet is not activist, does not mean that it is unbiased or "centrist." This is why the largest news organizations commonly referred to as "mainstream" can target the apolitical but also engage in biased reporting.

As far as bias at CNN and Fox goes, it's definitely true that bias exists at Fox News. Some of its shows are conservatively biased, but others (like Brit Hume's) are more politically neutral.

Any smart person who works in the television business knows it is liberally dominated. It's just politically incorrect to talk about it. This is why CBS News president Andrew Heyward told Bernard Goldberg that he'd deny ever admitting liberal bias, while at the same time denouncing FNC repeatedly for tilting rightward.

In the eyes of many TV people, to admit liberal bias is to acknowledge that their many critics have a point. This is antithetical to their elitist nature. At least that seems to be the viewpoint of some of the people we've talked to.

CNN fancies itself to be like the network news divisions which all emphasize being boring as an asset.

I figure that comes from the very early days of broadcast news, when sane people would have been terrified of the enormous responsibility they were taking on in attempting to "inform the nation" of what went on that day. That must have been pretty heady stuff. "My God, anything I say into this thing will be heard by 20 million people. I could tell them the Martians have landed, and they'd believe it."

It's interesting that Network News has continued in this vein even as local TV news has turned into a circus. That's probably because the "Big 3" have been locked in essentially a 3-way tie for years. There isn't the incentive to "go for broke" that there would be one of them were obviously going down the tube. This may change as Dan Rather fades, but my guess is that CBS will conclude that Gunda Dan just got too old, so they'll go find a younger pompus @ss and continue along the same path. From a purely business standpoint, the obvious move is to do what Fox did: everybody else is liberal, so we'll be conservative. 100% of 50% is a bigger number than 33%. I expect this to happen at NBC before it happens anywhere else though. Those news divisions are all full of liberals; they'll never do it unless a steely-eyed corporate parent who cares about money, not invitations to Hillary's parties, rams it down their throat. That'll be GE before it will be Disney or Viacom.

There really are more outlets devoted to giving the conservative perspective of the news than liberal ones.

That's probably true in some numerical sense. We have 213 hay-burner radio stations, while they only have CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN.