The Quick Brown is a Fox News headline tracker that visually displays deltas (additions and edits) in a quick-to-grok manner. It’s actually possible to watch the sensationalizing in slow-motion, which is as sickening as it is fascinating.

For example, the headline “Obama: Tax cut by April 1″ becomes “Obama gearing up for fight.”

The text of the article shifts from:
“President says he’ll fight to change health care, energy and education — even if lobbyists don’t like it”
to
“President says he’ll fight to change health care, energy and education — as GOP objects to budget’s cost.”

It’s almost like the news is being corroded before our eyes, where a perfectly reasonable story about taxes is tailored into a standoffish piece about Obama targeting the party of Fox News.

RTFA: http://www.thequickbrown.com/

What?
The Quick Brown tracks changes in Fox News headlines.

Legend
Styles used to show edits:

Red with strikethrough
Text that has been removed.

Black inverted:
Text or story that has been added.

Red
The story was removed from the headlines list.

Light grey
A headline that stayed the same.

Statistics
Stories: 7231
Total amount of edits: 10193
Running for: 550 days

RTFA: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/opinion/10brooks…

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.

She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all – men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission – because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission – by telling members of that class to go away.

I can hardly believe I’m reading David Brooks here. And yet, there it is. He’s really saying these words.

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