Rosebud

The NewsCorp travails in the UK may seem serious, but, frankly, they are as nothing compared with what the company has sown in the US.

Fox News is a monster out of control that has created a new political 'class' in the US and energised a lot of very stupid, under-educated and misguided misogynists, led by their moronic, self-aggrandising guru, Glenn Beck. In the UK he would have been chastised in a second, would never work again, and probably have been behind bars a long time ago. But somehow fact or balance are absolutely not required of TV News in the US thanks to the first amendment.

The problem is that Fox News has been an unabounded critical success, pandering to exactly the kind of person who committed the atrocities in Norway, or dreams of doing the same in the US. The clinically insane.

This is a channel where Beck runs teaparty camps for young children to indocrinate them, but who accuses the victims of the recent right win massacre in Norway of being, er... neo-Nazis for running democracy camps for older teenagers.

The channel has gone as far as taking the side of the mass murderer and blaming Norwegians for being Islamophiles. Remember, this is a NewsCorp and Rupert Murdoch owned channel, totally endorsed by him and his Board. He has created a monster, and it will destroy him.

As if this was not enough, the teapartiers are now threatening to bring down the whole US Government and are being egged on by Fox News, showing that the old fox himself may have lost all of his influence on this side of the Atlantic, but has total influence in the US, where total chaos in the financial system might give him a chance to pick up some more media trinkets. This is a man that's still capable of destroying the world we cherish with his support for opprobrium and the extreme in the cause of selling news and building his own empire.