One of the most pressing questions in contemporary international relations is how the world’s lone superpower, the United States of America, allowed its foreign policy (to say nothing of its record at home) to be hijacked by the ideological extremists of the Bush administration, and whether there’s any possibility of recovery from this situation in the near future.

The New York Review of Books has run a fascinating article that explores the right-wing bias that dominates the media in the country and does a good job of explaining the mechanism for the mass distribution of the ideology which has kept the administration in power. The success of those media vehicles do not suggest a hopeful answer to the question posed above. Some disturbing discoveries (some of which maybe wouldn’t be news to me if I hadn’t been out of the country for a few years):

• More than twice as many people watch Fox News as CNN
• Oliver North is now a Fox correspondent
• Eight of the top ten political blogs are "conservative,"¹ with Glenn Reynolds’ "InstaPundit" leading the charge.
• The decline of newspaper readership described in this article has lead to a situation in which "of twenty-three students asked to name as many members of the Supreme Court as they could, eighteen could not name even one."

Some other interesting findings include a note about the so-called "Fairness Doctrine," a measure introduced in 1949 (by the FCC?) to require TV and radio stations to give contrasting viewpoints equal time when covering "controversial issues." The effect of the measure was essentially to keep political commentary off the air. According to the article’s author, the repeal of this doctrine in 1986 explains the rise of Rush Limbaugh in 1988. But what first came to my mind when I reflected upon the date of this development was the appearance in the late 1980s of the Morton Downey, Jr. Show, in which a chain-smoking, apoplectically angry Downey inveighed against "pabulum-puking liberals" before an approving studio audience and, to my mind, single-handedly introduced a new era of alarmingly coarse programming into American popular culture. Those who haven’t had the opportunity to see this show, which was originally broadcast in syndication late at night, may have experienced its overall mean spiritedness in the sitcom parody featuring Rodney Dangerfield in Oliver Stone’s otherwise mediocre film Natural Born Killers.

Also of interest is the discussion of the excessive profit-orientedness of the newspaper industry, an industry which as a whole enjoys profit margins of 20.5%, versus a 6% average for the Fortune 500. For the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times among other media holdings, the figure is 30%. The second part of the article takes up the matter of the misuse of those profits in more depth.