Watching Fox News: Don't have a cow, man

ALTHOUGH it's easy to dismiss the Fox News Channel as the broadcast wing of the Republican Party, critics continually turn a blind eye to a basic virtue of FNC: It's really pretty entertaining. As is almost everything that Fox does in its many television incarnations, particularly the Fox Broadcasting Company and FX, the cable service.

If you look at Fox News as part of that corporate Murdochean empire, the prevalent aesthetic isn't conservatism, it's an in-your-face, irreverent attitude that can swing as far left ("The Simpsons") as it does right ("24"). The guiding principle of the Fox Broadcasting Network since the beginning has been to thumb its nose at the rest of the media while appealing to a younger audience. And while ratings fluctuate, Fox has been wildly successful at realizing its game plan, from "Married . . . with Children" to "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles." Meanwhile F/X continues to produce one sharply produced show after another, such as "The Shield" and "The Riches."

What do all these shows have in common with Fox News? One word - attitude.

Fox heroes and antiheroes all exist outside of the establishment, repulsed by conformity, cover-ups, and cowering. Fox News casts itself in the same light with its stable of commentators. And just as Fox Entertainment often shoots various television shows more imaginatively than the networks, Fox News is formalistically different from the rest of the pack, with more energetic graphics, starker close-ups, etc.

And I have to admit that I get a kick out of Bill O'Reilly. I always enjoyed jousting with him when I was a television critic and he was host of a Channel 7 afternoon series, a Channel 5 commentator, and host of "Inside Edition," a syndicated tabloid show. In the Boston days, his former colleagues at Channel 5 laughed at him for his hubris. They would chortle - and I along with them - about his boasting that he would someday replace Chet Curtis as anchor at Channel 5 and, later, Peter Jennings after ABC hired him.

Who's laughing now? Well, I am, the same way I laugh at the Labrador puppy who just relentlessly comes at my 2-year-old dog until she gives up and starts wrestling with him. It's a little bit like watching O'Reilly call Barney Frank a coward until Frank starts to "play" by calling him boorish and saying, "This is why your stupidity gets in the way of a rational discussion."

Great political discourse? No. Entertaining? Very.

Plus, why not have someone who treats politics differently than Tom Brokaw, Jim Lehrer, et al? Without O'Reilly, would Keith Olbermann and Stephen Colbert have their shows?

But here's the difference between Fox News and Fox Entertainment. The "establishment" Scully and Mulder fought in "The X-Files" was as likely to be conservative as liberal. The enemy for Fox News are liberals in general and the "liberal media" in particular. And when O'Reilly gets going on the latter subject, let's face it, we all know paranoid schizophrenics who have a greater grasp of reality.

If we have nothing else to be thankful to Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, and MSNBC for, it's to show what a liberal broadcast service would really look like.

In that sense it's a shame Rupert Murdoch put Fox News in the hands of Republican apparatchik Roger Ailes, rather than someone who decided to take on the establishment networks' real flaw - their overly genteel, pack-mentality way of dealing with whoever seems to be in favor. If Fox News had been as welcoming to Jon Stewart as it was to O'Reilly or to Olbermann as well as to Sean Hannity, then it would be a service that, like Fox Entertainment, would have really shaken up the paradigm.

Not that it's the end of the world to have CNN and the broadcast networks cater to the center, Fox News to the right, and MSNBC - with help from Comedy Central - to the left.

So when you think of Fox News, maybe the best advice is from another Fox commentator, Bart Simpson.

Don't have a cow, man.

Freelance writer Ed Siegel is a former television and theater critic for the Globe.