The New York Observer's Gabriel Sherman writes approvingly on the latest lefty hate attack on the media--Eric Boehlert's "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush"--and uses his review as an opportunity to slip in a casually huge falsehood about the most successful television news venture in history, Fox News Channel:

Historically, the wolf pack of media bashers has come from the right. Conservatives found they could whip up support from their base by exposing the MSM’s “liberal media bias” with a jab at The New York Times or the CBS News. (Roger Ailes launched Fox News to wild success based entirely on that single premise.)

The contemporary psychological term for what Sherman does here, coined by writer Neil Strauss in his book "The Game" about how to pick up women, is called "negging." It's basically a manipulative trust technique that incorporates a compliment and a put-down in the same sentence. The theory is that you're disarmed by the compliment--clearly, the provider of the compliment is perceptive and intelligent!--and thus more likely to believe the insult. This is what Sherman attempts with the reader. He compliments Fox News by truthfully referencing its "wild success," then slips in the untruth: that Roger Ailes made FNC such a success by simplistically and exclusively "jabbing" the NYT and CBS, and not by his revolutionary and genius concept of fair and balanced reporting.

Sherman gets an "F" in objective reporting...but an "A" in attempting to mess with the reader's mind to score biased political points. His pickup-artist-like psychological warfare is appropriate, though, because his brand of Fox News bashing is perfect barroom talk: all empty posturing, no substance.

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