If the news from the financial sector is grim, there's a new channel on cable to explain who's to blame. Rupert Murdoch, fresh from acquiring the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, saw the inauguration last week of his Fox Business News (FBN).

To gain viewers the plan is to emulate the techniques of Murdoch's flagship vehicle in the War on Reality, Fox News. Fox News purveys its agenda of right-wing disinformation and fear-mongering in a tits-and-ass presentation surrounded by flashing graphics so disco-like that you don't know whether to listen or dance. Emerging from the hypnotic strobe effects, female presenters project their tits while Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity show their ass.

The Reuters reporter Anupreeta Das described the new FBN channel as "perky," an adjective more commonly associated with bulbous portions of the female anatomy than with commerce. But business consultant Julian Delasantellis noticed that FBN's market analysis also set it apart from its rivals—

Call it karma, Karl Jung's synchronicity, serendipity, or just plain old bad dumb luck, but it is interesting that the US stock market chose to throw in a 5% price decline in the week that Rupert Murdoch's Fox Business cable channel, the unabashedly rightwing rah rah towel-snapping boobs over bonds alternative to General Electric's CNBC and Bloomberg TV, debuted in 30 million US homes.

In contrast to the rest of the financial media, which correctly placed the blame for this latest market falloff, culminating in Friday's 367-point, 2.6% fall in the US Dow Jones Industrial Average, on continuing and ever-deepening concern over the credit quality effects of the US subprime crisis, Fox Business rounded up the usual keffiyeh-clad suspects and was alone among the financial media in placing at least part of the blame for the selloff on market nervousness over the terror bombings that greeted former premier Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan the previous day.

And to whom or what will FBN attribute responsibility when oil hits $100 a barrel in the near future? The falling value of the dollar? Fears over the safety of the Turkish pipeline carrying oil from Iraq? I'm betting it will be the fault of the régime in Iran, unless of course the Bush administration has selected a new enemy by then.

Tags: * media cable television