Isn't the fact that they can only survive by giving advertisers/viewers what they want (instead of need) actually makes them inherently prone to slants and spins?
Ideally, this only applies to the stories that distributors and media outlets feel most compelled to give air time, and not necessarily their content.
O'reilly, for instance addressed complaints that Fox was giving too much air time to Paris Hilton and Micheal Jackson's death. He explained that, as a competitive business, Fox needs to report what potentially gets the most ratings. But that needn't entail that they fuck around with the facts of the stories they run.
MSNBC on the other hand, has outright stated that their station is geared specifically towards liberals--or "progressives" as they chose to call them. That puts them in a completely different stratosphere of reporting as far as competition goes.
