Last year, at about this time, I predicted that Gregg Easterbrook would "invent something completely impractical if not incredibly insulting" to explain why OU's opening 2007 football victory was evidence that the university was some kind of corrupt "football factory." This was just a week or so after Easterbook once again failed to count to six properly, this time saying Texas had "seven home games" by counting the OU-Texas game in Dallas as a "home game" for the Longhorns, just as he'd been counting it as a "home game" for OU in even-numbered years as evidence of a manufactured schedule with too many home games.

In fairness, I must now note the following:

• Easterbrook did not, in fact, invent reasons why Oklahoma's victory over North Texas State University was evidence of a team with bad character.

• In this year's complaint about "football-factory schools" playing "cupcake teams," for the first time in many even-numbered years, he did not mention the OU-Texas game in Dallas as an OU "home game."

Here's what he did say:

Monster schools that play seven home games versus just five road dates this autumn include Michigan, Ohio State, Oklahoma State, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Phonier still are the teams that play seven at home, five on the road and also have home dates against cupcakes. Oklahoma boldly opens by hosting Chattanooga, a Division I-AA team that last season went 2-9 with losses to Furman and Elon. Georgia Tech boldly hosts tiny Gardner-Webb, which last season lost by 35 points to Wofford. Little Nicky Saban's Alabama bravely hosts Western Kentucky, which, in the process of moving up from Division I-AA, technically is not in any subdivision this year. Preseason favorite Georgia bravely opens by hosting Division I-AA Georgia Southern.

Well, that's a bit of a slam—you won't be surprised to learn it's not the full story. You do, however, have to go back to 2004 to find out the real truth:

Clemson dropped Oklahoma from the 2008 and 2011 schedules citing ACC expansion as the reason. No buyout fee was paid. The games were scheduled by former AD Bobby Robinson in 2001. The 2008 game was scheduled to be in Norman and the 2011 one in Clemson. The last meeting of the 2 teams was a 13-6 Clemson win at the 1989 Florida Citrus Bowl.

Clemson previously added a 3 game series with Temple (2 home, 1 away) after Auburn dropped a home and home with the Tigers. Pitt remains on the schedule in 2009 and 2010.

The article also mentions that Clemson AD Terry Don Phillips looked at cancelling the home-and-home with Texas A&M this year and next year but the Aggies couldn't adjust their schedule.

Phillips made the following statement:

"They’ll slap me around," said Phillips, predicting some fans would be upset at the cancellation. "There’s a lot of people who want us to play Oklahoma every weekend, or Michigan or Ohio State. When you play in a great conference like we’re in, you don’t need to play marquee teams every weekend."

So, to recap: in 2001, just after winning the national championship, Oklahoma scheduled a home-and-home series with Clemson. It was to start seven years in the future because big schools get lots of requests to play big opponents and the schedules are worked out that far in advance. Three years later, Clemson backed out, with its new AD explicitly stating that they don't need to play "marquee teams" like Oklahoma every week. He also tried to cancel a home-and-home with Texas A&M, but the Aggies had no way to do it. OU was able to manage it and accommodated the ACC school.

The rescheduling is bad for OU exactly because Tennessee-Chattanooga is a I-AA (sorry, "Football Championship Division") school. Under BCS rules, wins against FCS teams don't count for anything in the BCS scores, but losses to FCS teams count just like losses to BCS teams. There's no statistical upside to winning and a huge deficit in losing (even though OU is heavily favored, the game's not over until it's over). Teams without FCS opponents can go 12-0 this year. Teams with one FCS opponent can only go 11-0 in the BCS.

Now, granted, there's no statistical benefit to being 11-0 instead of 12-0 in the BCS calculation, but there's a a huge downside to playing a game where a loss counts but a win does not. That's one reason why OU hasn't had a I-AA team on the schedule since Stoops's first season here ten years ago.

Yet I can't really blame Easterbrook for not knowing this—it is kind of hard to track down. I wouldn't have known it myself if I hadn't read it on The Crimson and Cream Machine earlier this week. Still, it's exactly the kind of detail that I'd like to think Easterbrook would dig up and include because it sheds light on things, and when it comes to Oklahoma, he rarely makes the effort.

(Oklahoma was also the home to Miss America 2007, decided mere weeks after Easterbrook insisted that pretty girls in Oklahoma "must be" flown in. He never managed to mention that, either.)

Think Progress noted today that the Washington Post broke its own attribution policy to let an anonymous Fox News flack attack Jon Stewart:

A Fox News spokesman, who was authorized to give the network’s response to Stewart’s comments but declined to be named, replied that “Jon’s clearly out of touch,” citing a Pew Research Center study showing the network has the most balanced audience in cable news, 39 percent Republicans and 33 percent Democrats. “But being out of touch with mainstream America is nothing new to Jon, as evidenced by the crash-and-burn ratings of this year’s Oscars telecast.”

The Pew Research Center study mentioned by flack-too-afraid-to-give-his-name has been rather popular with Fox News. They've been using it in ads to claim that CNN is "partisan" because 51% of CNN's audience identifies as Democratic while 18% identifies as Republican. With Fox News getting 39% Republicans and 33% Democrats, they take it as self-evident that they are "balanced."

This is because they suck at math and assume you do too.

This is the summary table from the "Watching, Reading, and Listening to the News" section of the report. You'll note that CNN's 51% got highlighted in bold, but look down a bit to the "General public" identification: 36% Democratic, 25% Republican, 29% independent, 10% "don't know."

In other words, in the general public, Democrats outnumber Republicans a little more than 7-5. If your news channel is getting an exact representative sampling of the general public, you should have 36% Democrats and 25% Republicans. This is not bias. In fact, ideally, it's the opposite of bias, because you're getting an exact statistical sampling of the United States population at large.

Now look again at Fox News's numbers: 39% Republican, 33% Democratic. In the country at large, for every 100 people who identify as Republicans, there are 144 who identify as Democrats. In the Fox News audience, for every 100 people who identify as Republicans, there are 85 who identify as Democrats.

Not only is Fox News not the "least biased," for every 100 Republicans in their audience, they are missing 59 of the Democrats that the same survey suggests they should get.

Or, to flip it around, for every 100 Democrats in the country at large, there are 69 Republicans. For every 100 Democrats who watch Fox News, there are 118 Republicans in the same audience. Fox News tilts so far towards the Republican party line that it attracts 71% more Republicans than baseline demographics would suggest.

This strongly suggests that the other measured outlets (CNN, MSNBC, nightly network news, and the PBS NewsHour) are not attracting Democrats so much as Fox News is attracting Republicans. With Republicans so drastically overrepresented in Fox News's audience, that leaves those who identify as Democrats—currently the largest identifiable political affiiliation in the country, followed by "independent" with "Republican" in third place—to split their viewership among the other outlets that aren't working so hard to cater to present only the Republican party line. CNN is the biggest beneficiary of this, but no news outlet has more Republicans than Democrats because the country at large doesn't. Except Fox News, who magically converts this absolute proof of its partisan bend into "the most balanced."

It's therefore not surprising that Fox News managed not to mention this Pew Research Center poll from earlier this year, showing that among the highly coveted 18-29 year old demographic, those who identify as Democrats outnumber those who identify as Republicans by a 58-33 spread. Nor did they manage to quote this paragraph from the exact same page as the figures they're trumpeting:

Two Fox News Channel talk shows, Hannity & Colmes and The O'Reilly Factor, also have highly conservative audiences. Hannity & Colmes is viewed regularly by 7% of the public; among the show's regular viewers, 68% describe themselves as politically conservative. The O'Reilly Factor with Bill O'Reilly is the most widely viewed talk show included in the poll: 10% of the public watches this show regularly and another 19% watch sometimes. Roughly two-thirds of O'Reilly's regular viewers are conservatives, while a mere 3% describe themselves as liberals.

Since its inception in 1996, Fox News has been explicitly and deliberately presenting the Republican party line, and asserting (without evidence other than whining Republicans) that since other media outlets are "biased against Republicans", then explicitly presenting the Republican party line must be "balance." This strategy has now attracted them an audience so massively and disproportionately Republican—more than 70% more Republican than the public at large—that they're repeating the same lie to make it sound like they're "balanced" instead of the most biased news outlet over their entire history.

Republicans oppose public education because it teaches you how to see through crap like this.