Fox News could never be accused of subtlety. In fact, it wears its right-of-centre heart on its sleeve, across its chest, in a large graphic behind the newscaster and scrolling across the screen. Just in case you miss the point – and you wouldn't if you were a patriot – the newscasters are there to sledgehammer their message into your nut-like cranium.
Glenn Beck, one of the ace faces on the channel, got particularly carried away this week with his effort to picture patriots squashed under the socialist boot of government. Uttering the kind of simile that would have you asking for your coat and speed dialling a taxi if you dropped it into polite conversation, Beck declared:
"We're the young girl saying 'no, no help me' and the government is Roman Polanski"
Beck has been leading the charge against plans to reform healthcare. Fox News and its followers want to keep the current healthcare schemes in place, with less government interference, even though the current Medicare and Medicaid schemes are also federally administered.
In a desperate push to have the bill defeated the news channel has been promoting anti-healthcare rallies around the country. Some of these were well attended, though perhaps not as well attended as Fox News would have liked, leading the channel to reuse old footage to exaggerate the number of people attending.
Unfortunately the Daily Show's Jon Stewart spotted the duplication, which was picked up in the UK by political blog Liberal Conspiracy, causing Fox's Sean Hannity to issue an apology.
The healthcare rallies saw President Obama compared to Hitler, but the Polanski gaffe signals a new low. Fox News may be asked to apologise again, and rightly so. Beck and his channel have the platform to spark healthy debate on the healthcare, yet they only choose to make sick remarks.
Neil Willis is a former freelancer with experience in the charity and consumer sectors, business to business publishing and national newspapers. He now works for an international news digest