To me the real crime of Fox news is not that they're hypocrites, but that I (and many many others) subsidize them and their jack-assery because I pay for cable TV, and because I cannot sufficiently punish them by electing to NOT TAKE THEIR CHANNEL -- they get my money anyways.

It's a fricking SUBSIDY to the tune of half their revenues.

And because news is relatively lowly rated overall, my bet, in a world of a-la-carte programming, is that extremism is punished with people voting with their wallets. Even though you have higher fox news ratings on a day-to-day basis, I would expect that if you gave people their CHOICE of a single news network, you'd find both MSNBC and FOX with fewer paying customers than CNN.

Said another way, the average joe doesn't watch 10 hours of FOX News a day (or MSNBC for that matter). He watches the news when a big story hits, and generally he turns to a centrist news agency (Network or CNN).

So END FOX NEWS SUBSIDIES, and let's get a-la-carte cable!