I have been watching Fox News for a long time, but not so much anymore. I don’t have cable anymore so it makes it difficult, though I still will visit their webpage. Here’s what I can say.
Back when I started watching Fox News, in around 2000 (I was but 14 years old then), I thought it was great. I really did feel like they tried to be fair and balanced. I also watched CNN and never really felt they were liberally biased.
By 2004-2006, they had started to slant pretty hard right. I still watched O’Reilly regularly, but he was starting to lose any liberal or moderate positions he ever held.
I still thought, “Well maybe having a network that balances out a slight liberal bias in the other networks is actually a good thing.”
Fast forward to the Obama election and it has been all downhill since then. They have become a joke of a network. I watch them only for entertainment value. O’Reilly has become a cranky, terrible old man who parrots hard-right talking points verbatim, non stop. He is a hypocrite and his “no spin zone” while it used to once mean something, means nothing now.
The Obama re-election was a thing of beauty on FNC. The denial of Carl Rove and confusion on the set was hilarious. The run up to it was brilliant as well, how they would talk about how you couldn’t trust the polls except for the ones that showed Romney ahead or just barely behind.
FNC is a complete and utter waste of everything, and I would classify it as an active source of evil and misinformation in the world.
But 95% of the blame should go to Roger Ailes, not Rupert Murdoch.