But is it antibacterial?

In a happy Dickensian moment, the good folks over at Pew Research have released their annual survey on how Americans feel about the press. The summary's long and dense, just the thing to dive into on a Monday morning.

Really, Pew guys, Monday morning? I've got to spend a few minutes chafing at Harry Knowles' foaming middleschooler drivel over at Aint It Cool News just to remember that I can read. If you want me, and the rest of weekending America, to decipher sentences such as "By wide margins, more Americans give favorable than unfavorable ratings to their daily newspaper (80%-20%), local TV news (79%-21%), and cable TV news networks (79%-21%), among those able to rate these organizations," then release this stuff on a Tuesday.

This gets Dickensian because I'd planned all along to talk about the genius marketing that catpulted Fox News Channel to the top of the cable news ratings, and mention why your bleach might be lying to you.

Here's a couple of interesting points from the Pew survey: 42% of those surveyed said news organizations "stand up for America"; 40% said news organizations are "too critical of America"--that's kind of their job, you know; and 72% say that news organizations tend to favor one side.

I hope the marketing department at Fox News gets hefty bonuses that let them afford those waterfront mansions that are so popular with the kids, because they've earned them. Getting almost three quarters of America to agree on anything is an accomplishment in itself; doing it to boost ratings is genius.

And they did it with three little words: fair and balanced. When Fox News hit the air on October 7, 1996, CNN already owned the lion's share of cable news viewers. Fox offered a programming alternative by stressing commentary over reporting, and started spreading those three little words around.

Now as someone who once made a living as a journalist, I can tell you that there's no such thing as a "biased" newsroom. Reporters, real reporters who aren't of the Nancy Grace opinion-first school, take their commitment to evenhanded coverage very seriously. Saying that a news channel is "fair and balanced" is akin to saying "water quenches thirst."

And nowhere in that "fair and balanced" statement does Fox suggest that other news outlets are skewing the news. But if you're CNN or the New York Times, you know that somewhere, someone is asking that question, and you can't answer it by saying, "Well we're not."

All you can do is point to the obvious bias in shows like the O'Reilly Factor and say, "How fair and balanced is that guy, Fox?" Which feeds right back into the marketing loop, because now the people who agree with O'Reilly are saying, "You know, Fox is really fair and balanced, because O'Reilly isn't on CNN."

Fox can answer the biased question by pointing to Alan Colmes and Greta van Susteren. Meanwhile poor Wolf Blitzer is trying to do the kind of evenhanded journalism he's done for years and watching his viewers head for Fox.

A couple of years back, one of the bleach companies stuck the word "antibacterial" on their bottles and went as far as to commission a computer-animated TV commercial that featured two bottles of Brand X bleach complaining that their labels didn't have the word "antibacterial." Never mind that all bleach is antibacterial--that's kind of its job, you know--the company that gets out first gets to make the claim.

I'm accepting bids from the likes of Aquafina and Perrier for the rights to "It quenches thirst." And if the research is right, I might change our slogan to "1-800-Bakery.com--Baked in ovens."