Fox's Las Vegas affiliate blasts Fox News: They have a “political agenda,” aren't “fair and balanced”

From a January 28 column about KVVU-TV Fox 5 in the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

“We're as fair and balanced as they're not,” says Fox-5 news director Adam P. Bradshaw, referring to Fox News Channel, which -- as any sentient human within earshot of a Glenn Beck crying jag knows -- is the Republicans' de facto PR machine. “We don't have an agenda.”

Yet viewer perceptions of FNC's red-meat, red-state dogma can carry over unfairly to Fox broadcast affiliates -- the Vegas affiliate included, based on some feedback to this columnist -- stung by the ideological guilt-by-association syndrome that turned the phrase “fair and balanced” into a bad media joke.

Last fall, the Fox News brand was further vilified when the White House criticized the cable prattler like an A-student calling out the school bully.

“Some viewers draw that connection,” Bradshaw says. “Most have never been able to tell a network from a local (station). I'll get on a plane in my Fox-5 jacket and somebody goes, 'I love (Fox News Channel's) Shepard Smith!' Or hate him. But it doesn't have any impact on our coverage.”

[...]

Some broadcast affiliates are indeed inclined to ape their cable cousin's tea-partying rhetoric -- the “O&Os” owned and operated by Fox, rather than independents such as Fox-5, run by the Meredith Corp. “Their (O&Os) coverage is more in line with the Fox attitude,” Bradshaw says. “We're not following their political agenda in any way, shape or form.”