Since Mickey Kaus doesn’t want to let the matter drop, how about we start the dossier with this item?

On November 2, [Fox affliate] WPXT reporter Erin Fehlau, 27, was hanging around a county courthouse, awaiting a verdict on an arson trial involving a young woman accused of starting dormitory fires at a local college. It was a big story. But then a bigger one fell in her lap.
Around 3 p.m., while Fehlau was waiting, a police officer told the reporter about a conversation she had overheard. A judge and a lawyer had been discussing Bush’s driving-under-the-influence arrest. After the verdict, Fehlau spotted attorney Tom Connolly, a Democratic National Convention delegate who had run unsuccessfully for governor of Maine. He confirmed the arrest and gave her the case number. […]
[WPXT News Director Kevin] Kelly had only been working in Maine for two years. He wasn’t sure if the arrest was even news. His staff is young, and no one there had worked at the station in 1976. “I called Fox News in New York City to see if we were flogging a dead horse,” he says.
They weren’t. Fox News Channel quickly confirmed the arrest with the Bush campaign and ran the story shortly after 6 p.m. The Associated Press picked it up, and the incident soon became the focus of campaign coverage.

Fox News broke the story of Bush’s DUI just days before the 2000 election. It was exactly the kind of disclosure that Kaus said he would not have made to his readers had he uncovered similarly damning information about Obama.

As for other instances of Fox News demonstrating its “independence” from the Bush White House, Kaus has shifted the goalposts a bit by disqualifying anything relating to “issues (like Harriet Miers and immigration) where Roger Ailes’s network initially, and disconcertingly, appeared to toe and try to hold the Bush line before eventually acceding to its viewers’ opinions and allowing dissenting conservatives to express themselves.” So if I produce an example of John Gibson or Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly (closed-borders types) blasting amnesty supporters, Kaus could go back and find an example of Neil Cavuto (more of a Wall Street Journal type) arguing that we can’t just deport 12 million people and Bingo! case closed. Clearly, Ailes instructed Cavuto to toe the Bush line until the passions of Fox’s viewers forced him to unleash Gibson and Hannity and O’Reilly.

Okay, fine. How about steel tariffs, another Bush policy that was famously unpopular with conservatives?

Here’s how Fox covered Bush’s decision:

On March 1, 2002, Special Report ran a story about how the tariffs would hurt domestic steel consumers. “American companies using steel say a tariff will hammer them,” reported Fox correspondent Steve Brown. The segment revolved around an interview with the CEO of a metal-products company, who said the tariffs would cripple steel consumers and cost Bush his vote.

On March 5, Brit Hume interviewed Peter Morici, a university professor who supported the tariffs. Hume sounded skeptical:

HUME: All right. Now you said — when I hear this and I see the steel decision, it — to me, it sounds a little bit like deja vu all over again, as, I guess, Yogi Berra famously said. It seems to me the steel industry has been hurting for a long time in this country… Why should people not think this is a replay of an old and kind of failed experiment?

Hume didn’t shout Morici down — that’s not his style — but he did ask tough questions and follow-ups:

HUME: So what — so now what — if this allows steel a little breathing room, what about the argument you hear made by these other industries — automobiles, others, all steel consumers — that this hurts them and ultimately hurts the people who buy their products.
MORICI: Well, we don’t expect a lot on the increased tariff to be passed through in price increases. I expect on the 30 percent on a hot roll (ph), 20 percent will be absorbed by the foreign producers. Of the 10 percent that comes in — excuse me. Of the 10 percent remaining on the tariff, I expect there’s so much excess capacity in the United States that essentially what will happen is domestic steel will replace foreign steel, but prices won’t rise that much.
HUME: But prices will rise some.

A March 5 segment from Fox reporter Jim Angle covered both sides of the debate. The segment featured administration officials defending the tariffs, but it also featured a spokesman for steel consumers arguing that the tariffs would drive jobs overseas. Angle closed with this line:

The administration was deeply divided as well, Brit, with many officials fiercely arguing against any protectionist action in favor of steel. But what finally swayed the argument, apparently, was the idea that if the president didn’t crack down when people abused the system and subsidized their exports to the U.S., then the president would never be able to get support here at home for free-trade agreements.

One could arguably view this as “water-carrying” for the Bush administration. Or, one could view it as Angle reporting what administration officials told him about the internal debate over the tariffs. No doubt, this account omitted the role electoral politics in Pennsylvania and West Virginia might have played in the administration’s decision. But — absent confirmation that such considerations did play a role — any reporting by Angle to that effect would have been pure speculation.

Furthermore, the Bush administration did go on to push a broader free-trade agenda. Exactly five months later, the Democrat-controlled Senate voted 64–34 to give the administration Trade Promotion Authority (the power to submit trade agreements to Congress for an up-or-down vote). Would the White House have won this vote if it hadn’t imposed tariffs on steel? Who knows? But Bush could be forgiven for thinking that it wouldn’t.

Finally, on March 9, the “Beltway Boys” — Fred Barnes and Mort Kondrake — slammed the administration’s decision:

KONDRACKE: You know, this is the second Bush blow to the, the concept of free trade, which he pays such lip service to. The first one, he sold out to the textile interests when he was trying to get trade promotion authority, hurting, among other countries, the Caribbean countries… and also Pakistan, which wants (UNINTELLIGIBLE) to send his textiles. Now, this one, he’s, he’s caved in to steel, big steel, and the steel voters […]
BARNES: And, and, and, and the truth is, we’re not. I mean, this was a, a — I thought, a pretty lame rationale the president gave. These other countries aren’t dumping steel. And, and secondly, he did give away the high ground. Look, he certainly has the political capital and the popularity to get away with not coddling the steel industry, which will — is not going to be improved by this.
Not only did he lose the high ground in dealing with our, our, our trading partners around the world, this just invites other industries in the United States to come in for their bailouts, and they’ll be there soon.
Horrible decision.

So how did Fox do? News coverage: fair and balanced. Commentary: Vigorously opposed.

You can see why I didn’t jump to meet this challenge when Kaus threw down the gauntlet last week. This is tedious, and I doubt I’ve changed anyone’s mind. But maybe I’ve convinced Kaus that I could keep going in this vein (Fox’s Katrina coverage? Shepard Smith? Remember when O’Reilly wanted to slap a windfall profits tax on the oil companies?), and he’ll do us both a favor and drop it.

Bottom line: Forget about Ailes and his old GOP ties. It’s not in Fox’s interest to act as a mouthpiece for the GOP. Conservatives have grown increasingly disenchanted with the party that’s supposed to represent them. Today, we learn that conservatives outnumber moderates and liberals, yet the GOP’s approval ratings are historically low. Do the math. Also, am I supposed to believe that Glenn Beck takes his marching orders from the GOP? Really? Because — to the chagrin of many on the Left and some on Right — it appears to be the other way around.