According to viewer polls (and Dunc) it appears that Rupert Murdoch's Fox News channel ("We Report, You Decide") is the American people's broadcaster of choice for information about Little Bush's liberation of the Iraqi people.

Always interested in learning what take other media have on the big stories of the day, I decided to check out Foxnews.com to see why its TV parent has caught the US's imagination.

I must say Rupert's got himself a lovely website which enables people to get real added value from their news.

You can register as a Fox Fan for greater news benefits like wallpaper of your favourite presenters and crucial advice on how to get hold of foreign goods without breaking the boycott of French produce; you can buy media memorabilia in the Fox News shop ("You too can dress like a complete anchor"); or get free jelly beans and other stuff from the site's advertising section - all important for those mid-bulletin munchies; then catch up with the latest on the war in the "Operation Iraqi Freedom" special section. And then there's "Fallen Heroes", America's list of war dead. The names of these last two sections are very important: not only do they make them easy for you to find, they also leave you with no doubt as to who the good guys are. Not like the cheese-eating surrender monkeys at the BBC who refuse to refer to British forces as "our troops".

Not quite so easy to find is any opportunity for users to give their views or enter topical debates on, say, the morality of war. But that's okay because news should be about being told what to think, not as a resource for informing decisions.

So based on all that, Fox News is definitely a source of balanced, impartial reporting then...

Well, that's what I assume. I never managed to get past all the fun and games to find the real news.

N.B. The great John Simpson today used the phrase "shooting fish in a barrel" in a report about Northern Iraq. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear...