I’ve maintained for a long time that “Fox News” is an oxymoron, so it was refreshing to see the Newsweek piece The O’Garbage Factor by Jacob Weisberg, in which he points out that the politicized Australian-British style of reporting that Rupert Murdoch brought to America with Fox is simply un-American. I’d go further, and suggest that the Fox network in general is directly responsible for many of America’s cultural ills. While I love “edginess” and “pushing the envelope” when it comes to media and creativity, it should be clear to anyone who watches the evolution and influence of pop media that Fox has taken the lowest common denominator as low as it can go, and had a profound negative impact on American culture on the way down. Fox originally sliced out its market share with shows like Married With Children, a show that I personally found amusing, but that clearly blazed a trail for the later cultural cancers (also brought to us by Fox) like “Reality TV” (now there’s an oxymoron) and ranting morons like Bill O’Reilly. I mean, when you start at the bottom, “lowest common denominator” eventually means “subterranean rot infested with maggots”, which I think would be a good description of a typical episode of The O’Reilly Factor or some of the more desperate reality TV shows. So what’s a person to do? Well, you could plan a meeting with your more influential media-savvy friends. Just make sure American Idol isn’t on that night.