DATELINE: Medford, Oregon

After 24 leg-weary, election-less hours hanging out in San Francisco, barking at the sunset with Pier 39’s sea-lions and shopping with the Haight’s hippies, today it was time to move on again. Driving north from Oakland we stopped at a cheapo roadside place called Straw Hat Pizza in Williams, California. They have little embedded Fox News TVs in the wall-side of the diner booths, so you can corrode your brain and your arteries at the same time. It’s been a while since we had the displeasure. The host was interviewing some smarmy city-boy jerk about Mitt Romney’s (unsurprising) exit from the race; he wanted to know how jerk-boy’s fellow money-men would react to a President McCain.

“Well,” he said dismissively, “Wall Street doesn’t trust John McCain, because he’s a man of principle.”

The presenter looked at him like maybe he was forgetting something. Forgetting that maybe, somewhere out there, people might consider that being a man of principle might not be a shortcoming. In the next segment, the host put it to a Clinton supporter that Obama was now in the ascendancy in the Democratic race. The logic runs that even though the delegate count is pretty even, Obama has the momentum and the funds to do better in the next few rounds of voting, on 9, 10, 12, and 19 February. He pointed out that since winning big in (predominantly white) states since South Carolina, Obama was “no longer the proverbial black candidate”.

Did he really just say that? The proverbial black candidate. Tom and I froze in mid-chew. A Fox pundit proceeded to explain that the Democrats would be “riven by internecine strife” in the coming months, because they hadn’t already anointed a candidate; a ludicrous claim to anyone who watched the back-slapping charade that was masquerading as the last Democratic debate. It seems clear from our travels that however long it takes to choose between them, Democrats will happily get behind either Obama or Clinton. The same cannot be said for a Republican party that stands at an ideological crossroads - they’ve got a leader now, sure, but a lot of Christian conservatives do not want to follow McCain where he’s going.

As we finished off our ‘Hot Hat’ pizza pockets an advert for that evening’s O’Reilly Factor thundered “Is the media distorting the election?” Bill O’Reilly decrying media distortion? Fox decrying media distortion? I pushed my excess salad croutons away in disgust. No amount of blue cheese dressing or complimentary lemonade refills can neutralise the bitter taste you get watching Fox rummage through the bins and rabidly chase its tail.

If you’re a Britisher and don’t really know what all the fuss is about, check out Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. It’s guilty of some Michael Moore-ish hyperbole at times, but it’s still essential viewing. Or if you don’t have 90 minutes to spare, here’s a fun little two minute clip. And if you think that it’s just lefty propaganda to claim that Fox is right-wing propaganda, check the facts: a stunning 67% of Fox News viewers polled in 2003 believed there was a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, compared with 16% of PBS (public access) viewers. There was no connection, of course, as Donald Rumsfeld admitted in 2004.