NYT plays dumb about MSNBC/Fox News

It's in an article about soft ratings for CNN under the Obama administration. The Times contrasts that lack of success with MSNBC and Fox News, which the newspaper claims, have carved out winning formulas by being more partisan:

The development raises an obvious question: With its rivals stoking prime time with high-octane political opinion and rant, can CNN compete effectively with a formula of news delivered more or less straight?

See, both MSNBC and Fox News are airing rants during primetime. They're like left-right mirror reflections. They're just like each other.

This is a common ploy adopted by the mainstream media in order to play dumb about the radical, unprecedented rhetoric that Fox News has been broadcasting since Obama's inauguration; that he's a radical, a socialist, a fascist. That tyranny looms and the government wants to confiscate all the guns.

How on earth does anything that MSNBC has aired in the last three months come anywhere near matching that kind of militia media rhetoric broadcast by Fox News? It doesn't because we've never seen anything like what Fox News now peddles aired on American television before. But there's today's Times, casually claiming that MSNBC and Fox News are exactly alike.