The difference between Fox "News" and MSNBC

Excerpt from the transcript (via the New York Times):

Let this incident lay to rest forever the facile, never-true-anyway, bullpucky, lazy conflation of Fox News and what the rest of us do for a living. I know everybody likes to say, “Oh, that’s cable news. It’s all the same. Fox News and MSNBC, mirror images of each other.”

Let this lay that to rest forever. Hosts on Fox raise money on the air for Republican candidates. They endorse them explicitly; they use their Fox News profile to headline fund-raisers. Heck, there are multiple people being paid by Fox News now essentially to run as presidential candidates. If you count not just their hosts but their contributors, you are looking at a significant portion of the whole lineup of Republican presidential contenders for 2012. They can do that because there’s no rule against that at Fox. They run as a political operation. We’re not.

Yes, Keith’s a liberal, and so am I, and there are other people on this network whose political views are shared openly with you, our beloved viewers. But we are not a political operation. Fox is. We are a news operation. And the rules around here are part of how you know that.

I talked about the "Fox candidates" - Fox employees running for president (all Republican, of course) - before. And, something that Rachel Maddow didn't mention here, I noted how their parent company gave $1 million to the Republican Party and another $1 million to the Chamber of Commerce to lobby for Republicans.

MSNBC is not the left-leaning equivalent of Fox "News." Not even close. As Maddow points out, MSNBC is a news operation. They have opinions, but... don't we all? Fox is not, fundamentally, a news organization. It's a political organization masquerading as a news station. That's a big, big difference.