The swirl continues.

I complained yesterday that the Kerry camp is trying to create a swirly mass of confusion about the Swift Boat Vet ads (specifically about who's really behind them), and I see today the NYT TV critic Alessandra Stanley is visualizing cable news as a swirly mass: an industrial laundry dryer, tumbling "Facts, half-truths and passionately tendentious opinions ... without the softeners of fact-checking or reflection."

Somehow, on all-cable news stations - CNN as well as Fox News - a story that rises or falls on basic and mostly verifiable facts blurs into just another developing news sensation alongside the latest Utah kidnapping or the Scott Peterson murder trial. (It is particularly confusing on Fox News, where so many of its blond female anchors look like Amber Frey.)

Yes, all those blondes look alike, don't they? I think most Fox News viewers can tell the difference between the beautiful Laurie Dhue and anyone else.

Fox News, which delivers its news with "Fight Club" ferocity, has relished the controversy the most, seizing hungrily on charges that Mr. Kerry lied to gain his medals.

From this, you'd never guess that Bill O'Reilly, by far the most prominent news analyst on the channel, repeatedly states his strong opposition to the Swift Boat ads. Stanley makes this point, however, that I agree with:

[Cable news] has grown into a lazy habit: anchors do not referee - they act as if their reportage is fair and accurate as long as they have two opposing spokesmen on any issue.

This is really the basic "Crossfire" idea for a show. It goes back at least as far as the old "60 Minutes" "Point/Counterpoint" bit that Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd spoofed on "Saturday Night Live" in the 1970s. It seems to work well enough to bring in an audience of the subset of TV watchers who are willing to watch political shows. But I don't know if anyone is getting confused by this sort of thing. People in the middle who want to decide between the two sides just won't watch--you don't sit and watch the laundry tumbling in the dryer. The people who are watching are already bound to one partisan side, and for them it's more like watching a sports match and cheering for your team. You enjoy a lively competition, you don't rethink your support for you team, and you don't long for a more interventionistic referee.

UPDATE; Bill O'Reilly had the Stanley article as "The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day" on his show last night and noted that he'd be vindicated if the Times would print a transcript of his show from the previous night, which really did have a long segment cooly going through the Swift Boat charges (with Chris Wallace) and evaluating them. His final slam unnecessarily slurred blogs, as he said her article "belongs on one of those bomb-throwing websites, not in a national newspaper." Some day, it may be a compliment to say something sounds like what is written in the blogs. To be fair, he did specify the "bomb-throwing websites" and not blogs in general.