As Bush is increasingly recognized as a lame duck, perpetually wrong, increasingly irrelevant president, so is his propaganda outlet, FOX. From James Poniewozik at TIME:

[FOX] has to figure out how not to seem like yesterday's news. At times recently, the network has appeared uncertain about its focus. Its primary-night coverage has felt staid and listless. Sometimes it has gone tabloid with celebrity-news, true-crime and scandal stories (WEBSITES POSTING SEXY PICS LIFTED FROM FACEBOOK). At other times it has retreated into a kind of war-on-terrorism news-talgia, playing up threatening chatter and new missives from al-Qaeda leaders while its rivals are doing the election 24/7; flipping to Fox can feel like time-traveling to 2002.

And this week, the New York Times reported that CNN finally edged past FOX for an entire quarter of the year:

The political season continues to be very good to CNN, which will officially announce on Tuesday that for the first time since 2001, it managed to beat the Fox News Channel in prime time for one quarter of the year in the category of news viewers most desirable to advertisers, according to Nielsen. Thanks to its debate coverage and heavy focus on the presidential primaries, CNN’s ratings in prime time for viewers 25 to 54 were up 90 percent, to an average of 453,000 for the first quarter of 2008. That was enough to edge past the perennial leader, Fox, which had 438,000 viewers, up 12 percent from last year.

While this is a slim victory for CNN, it's important to note that CNN beating FOX for an entire quarter would have been unthinkable even two years ago. And while it’s obviously too soon to celebrate the end of FOX, it’s clear that the channel is going through an identity crisis.

Conservatives still hate John McCain, but FOX can’t really go after him much since he’s the Republican nominee. Conservatives hate Hillary Clinton, but Rupert Murdoch (FOX's owner) has been chummy with her, and Republicans don’t want to tear her down too much since they’d rather run against her than Barack Obama (besides, Chris Matthews has already claimed the job of sexist Hillary Hater). Conservatives and Republicans are afraid of Obama, but they don’t really know how to go after him without revealing the racism, xenophobia, and intolerance that most of the nation rejects but epitomizes the republican party. FOX can’t cheerlead for Bush since it’s obvious to everyone on the planet that he has been an unparalleled failure on Iraq, the economy, the environment, foreign policy, etc. FOX can’t talk about the Iraq war since it’s become impossible to claim by any measure that it’s going well or that it’s accomplishing goals that are constantly being changed, abandoned, or debunked. FOX can’t fearmonger about terrorism without inferring that the Iraq war has done nothing to decrease the threat of terrorism.

But, as TIME points out, FOX will always have its dead-ender core of viewers, who will always turn to FOX to get their fill of fear, hate, and sex. Who want to know which college professors are destroying America, which franchise is putting out the sexiest burger ads, which blogs are run by “Nazis,” or what flavor of brown people is currently destroying their lives and imperiling the American way. These are viewers who have no memory, either through the ravages of old age, an incapacity to admit errors, or an inability to engage in meaningful self reflection. But one thing FOX viewers can do is fear and hate. FOX just hasn’t figured out who they should be fearing and hating next.

But in my heart of hearts, my hope is that people are turning away from FOX because they have seen that FOX is not a news organization. And from Iraq to the economy to Bush, FOX has been wrong about EVERYTHING and has made its viewers look like fools. Which is fine with FOX, who also thinks their viewers as fools — that’s why they constantly lie to them.