Heli's Heaven and Hell Radio has been joined by a number of bloggers lately in slipping an ironic "fair and balanced" tag into the titles of their places.
They've been inspired, if that's the word, by the Fox vs. Franken case on which Heli today brought us up to speed:
Reuters: "A federal judge on Friday slammed Fox News' trademark infringement lawsuit against Al Franken and his publisher Penguin Group and refused to stop the sale of the liberal satirist's new book that pokes fun at the network and host Bill O'Reilly.
Fox charged that Franken had violated its trademarked phrase 'fair and balanced' by including it on the cover of his book entitled 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them'. Fox is owned by News Corp. and Penguin is a unit of Pearson. The book went on sale on Thursday."
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If you like needles in haystacks, the Iraq weapons dossier evidence that's shaken the British government and the BBC alike is instructive.
Particularly some of the e-mail:
That's part, self-evidently, of an e-mail from BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan, now in the public domain under the 'Evidence' tab on the site of the Hutton Inquiry into the apparent suicide of microbiologist David Kelly on July 17, three days after it was sent.
I've been looking through this stuff -- which takes the shape of downloadable .pdf files -- since picking up Thursday morning's story that Lord Hutton's investigation would start publishing its evidence.
 It's not easy, when some of the papers look like this, no less and no more. But at this stage, even before Defence Minister Geoff Hoon and Tony Blair himself have their say (Beeb) next week, the site is still worth a visit.
The Net has in the past month carried masses of speculation of the kind launched at Lisa Rein's Radar, a highly readable American 'blog, on July 22. At GuluFuture, another "inside track" where I sometimes hitch a train ride, editor Fintan Dunne was already posting the Kelly murder scenario the previous day.
Get me right: I'm not knocking the speculators and conspiracy theorists, being pretty good at that myself. Indeed, Dunne's kind of site, which has returned to the story since, makes for gripping reading with some good links.
When I told the Wildcat that I'd spent about three hours sifting the Hutton site, she asked me what I made of it and proffered her own "gut feeling" that the single-source aspect to this sorry saga had been a bad idea.
Yes. But in the defence domain, it can be pretty hard, sometimes to do otherwise.
I don't know yet, what I make of it all.
What I've read in this evidence confirms an impression, however: by the time the second Gulf War began, on the most questionable of pretexts, both Tony Blair's government and some in the BBC's news services were spoiling for a fight.
Whether Dr Kelly took his own life or was murdered, he and his family were, in part, victims in crossfire that became increasingly intense with the start of the summer.
One of the most interesting and useful features of what the Hutton Inquiry has put on line, so far, is that it's raw, unadulterated but for those hefty swipes of a thick black pen.
Here the marker is used more sparingly. Never mind the content for now, it's the medium that continues to intrigues me.
"Spin" was one of the major banes of the war coverage.
Spin by governments.
Spin by the media.
Spin by bloggers like me.
For now, the Hutton Inquiry site, as such, is a spin-free zone.
For now, as the evidence mounts, there's reason to hope that it will remain that way. And thus, we might learn a thing or two.
2:34:04 PM link 
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