A new poll released today says that Fox News is the most trusted television news network in the country.

What?? Fox? The network with the tongue-in-cheek “fair and balanced” motto? The network of Glenn Beck?  The network the Obama Administration says it considers “the communications wing of the Republican party”?  How could this possibly be? Yet a Public Policy Polling nationwide survey of 1,151 registered voters Jan. 18-19 found that 49 percent of Americans trusted Fox News, which was 10 percentage points more than any other network.

I think there are several reasons for this result.

1. Every news network other than Fox has thoroughly disgraced itself by blatantly cheer-leading for both candidate Obama and President Obama, and even the president’s supporters sense it. The ridiculously reluctant coverage by these networks of stories like the Van Jones allegations, ACORN’s problems and the use of the NEA to push a the White House’s political agenda, all of which were later shown to be newsworthy and legitimate, left an overwhelming impression that the President was being protected rather than covered.
2. The Fox bias is out front. It is a conservative-oriented network, and nobody there seriously maintains otherwise. The liberal bias of NBC, ABC, CBS, and, until recently, CNN, on the other hand, is both obvious and directly contrary to those networks’ public statements. We trust those who are open about their biases, and distrust those who deny them.
3. The Center for Media Public Affairs recently released a study showing that Obama’s network coverage was more positive in his first year than any recent president. Fox’s coverage, while overwhelmingly negative (78%), was essentially the same as the other networks critiques of Bush, Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Reagan. Fox appeared, in other words, to be applying the level of skepticism that had come to be expected of news reports, whether it was fair or not.
4. People believe what they already are inclined to believe. The other networks are ideologically to the left of the American public. Fox is to the right of it, but conservatives still outnumber liberals.
5. 49% is still lousy.

The last is the most important. No network received a positive trust ranking from even half the public. Fox didn’t charge ahead of the other networks in trustworthiness. The other networks just destroyed their credibility sufficiently to come down to Fox.

None of the networks have anything to be proud of in the trust department.