So the FOX Business Network (FBN) launched yesterday. I haven’t watched it yet, but judging from the review of FBN’s first day, it looks like it’s delivering exactly what I thought it would:

ON Fox Business Network, the sky isn’t falling — it’s the ground that is going up.

The mood on Rupert Murdoch’s latest television venture was so giggly and upbeat that it belied its own crawl, showing sinking stock prices. -snip-

FBN provides economic news for people who don’t follow the economy very closely and hate to hear bad news. Sunny, informal and downright perky, Fox Business Network comes off as a blend of CNBC and a fifth hour of the “Today” show — with the underlying political drumbeat of Fox News. (Global warming is natural and so are tax cuts.) -snip-

Anchors described record oil prices with a lilt, they delighted in the fall of the dollar as a boon to American exports. -snip-

“You want to basically have fun,” [Bill] O’Reilly told the anchor Cheryl Casone. “Its so intense, the whole business world. The more fun you can have with it, I think the more people will watch.”

After all, who wants to learn about sound investing if it isn’t “fun” and is full of buzzkilling “bad” news? After all, isn’t your IRA and 401k just like a businessy version of fantasy football, except that it has your retirement and your hopes and dreams for the future riding on it? Personal finance is just a hobby, like gardening — except in this case, if your economic roses get root rot, you get to live the last few decades of your life in poverty as a burden to your family.

FBN’s economic news coverage reminds me of the way FOX Noise covers the Iraq war. For the first few years of it, FOX kept telling its viewers that everything was great in Iraq. The US was clearly “winning, there was gobs of “progress”, every school got at least three new coats of paint, Iraqis were delighted to have the US forcibly occupying their country, and any bad news (like the insurgency, civil war, failing reconstruction, non-existent political reconciliation, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, etc) was just the “liberal” media, democrats, and far-left wackos being a bunch of nitpicking Gloomy Guses who hate America. Until it turned out that all this “bad news” FOX was insulating its viewers from was exactly the kind of information its viewers needed to correctly understand why Iraq was becoming an intractable debacle. And when it became impossible for FOX to continue its rosy assessments of the Iraq war, it simply stopped covering it, which explains why FOX covers the war less than any real news channel.

And who benefited from this propaganda? The Bush administration. Not regular people watching their kids being sent to Iraq, not regular people wondering why budgets for social services and school programs were being slashed, not regular people who might’ve had second thoughts about re-electing Bush if they’d known that Iraq was already becoming the worst foreign policy disaster in US history. FOX’s propaganda helped the Bush administration at the expense of America and the rest of the world.

And this is what you want from a business channel? A channel that only tries to tell you “good” news about the economy instead of the truth? A channel that will lie and misinform you about the state of your finances in order to make the Worst President Ever look good? A channel that always tries to give you the silver lining while failing to tell you that the cloud is made of poisonous gas? A channel that struggles to find “good” news about the economy instead of trying to explain why the “bad” news is happening?

Maybe that sounds too heavy. Maybe you don’t want to know the true state of your finances. Maybe you don’t want to know what your financial future holds. Maybe you don’t care if you can buy a house or your kids go to college. You just want to have fun. In that case, FBN offers you this:

For the inaugural show, the FBN anchor…then went down to Times Square to interview an entrepreneur of the day, the Naked Cowboy, a guitar-strumming singer who says he earns $250,000 a year serenading tourists in a cowboy hat and underpants, and much more in merchandising and record contracts.

“No matter what you think at home,” Ms. Glick, formerly a temporary anchor on the “Today” show on NBC, said, giddily holding up a souvenir hat and briefs. “You can make a small business a reality.”