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This horse is very much alive and in your living room eating the furniture.

*edit* Great graphic.^
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I should have clarified. The Newspapers may in the future cease to print paper editions, but have online editions. One of the big papers in NC has more hits on its website than it has newspaper subscriptions. The organizations themselves will continue to exist, just present the news in a different medium. I should have used nytimes.com as an example rather than Drudge.
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One point everyone seems to be missing about the "bias" at FOXnews is that many of the programs on the channel are opinion/commentary shows and not hard news per se. The hard news is reported usually in smaller headline type segments in a completely unbiased manner. Where you may get a conservative feel from FOX is that most of the hosts of the commentary shows are on the right side of the aisle, however even in these formats I find most of the commentators have guests from the opposite side and give them a chance to give their point of view. Also when Fox has panel discussions they actually have an equal distribution of panelists representing both sides and even the middle of the political spectrum. This doesn't happen on any other network, on other networks 4 leftists to 1 conservative is considered balance.

These opinion shows on FOX are akin to the editorial pages of any newspaper. I have no problem with any show labeled as opinion having a bias. I find the leftist slant that exists in the actual news reporting of all the major networks and newspapers much more disturbing and insidious as they too often present their opinions in the guise of being just a simple presentation of the facts.

The one area I may remain open to discuss regarding the "bias" of FOX is the selection of stories they choose to cover on their hard news segments. You will see many stories covered on FOX, not covered by the others. Still even in this case it may just be because the bias of the other networks keeps them from covering them. Examples would be positive stories from Iraq and any story that would be considered negative towards Obama. Stories that Fox would cover in an unbiased manner with appropriate fact checking, but the other networks would generally ignore.
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:-), but only 50% of it :-)

In reality, we're all arguing TWO different things, that are so closely related that most folks have just been mixing them together.

One is an opinion of the journalism of FOX news and other newscasters, particularly an opinion that is somewhat influenced by one's own personal politics. What one "likes" to hear is included in this, or what one "feels" is an accurate representation of the world. If you are big into Political Correctness, than your idea of what you would like to see in a "proper" newscast is going to differ from someone who is not very PC. Either way, not a factual discussion.

The other is not opinion, and focuses solely on the facts of the journalistic practices of FOX or another organization in question. Example, BBC is admittedly biased. No personal opinion there. Other's have argued that because FOX typically airs people from both sides of the aisle in a discussion show, that they are not biased, while other's still have pointed out that the hosts of most shows on FOX are right leaning, so therefore the network is biased. In this case, it's a discussion of FACTS to arrive at a conclusion, rather than an opinion. Of course the conclusion arrived at will probably vary a little from person to person and take the form of an opinion... but at the least discussion was factual, right?
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I'll avoid just adding to the pot on the rest of your post (which I agree with mostly), and instead focus on this one line. Someone else (too lazy to read back and find it) mentioned something to the effect of "the news not reported was just as important as what they do report."

How very, very, VERY true this is. We can all come up with examples, so I won't cross this into a political discussion, however its really a simple principle that most people overlook when discussion a network's bias. What do they NOT report on? Clearly if MSNBC never reports on a positive story out of Iraq, then viewers have no idea to what degree and ratio positive VS negative things happen. Or if you hit up a news source that only reports the positive things, again viewers have no idea where things stand on the big pictures, positive vs negative.

Bottom line, there's no easy solution for this one, and I think is much more indicative of the TRUE bias of a news source. It's easy to judge a bias by what they say. But much harder to locate and identify a hidden bias, based on what they DONT say.
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yep... we're getting close :-)
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