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O’Reilly was not at his obnoxious worst this week, perhaps because of the elevated setting of Madison Square Garden. Still, he had his moments. He called Slate editor and mild-mannered liberal Jacob Weisberg a "far-left bomb-thrower," and said the New York Times had "shamed itself" by assigning Weisberg to review three anti-Bush books. He yelled at Democratic strategist Lanny Davis for allegedly mouthing party talking points, while thanking Republican strategist Mary Matalin for not doing the same, even though she did. He interviewed former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, and kept his cool even though Weld refused to trash Kerry, to whom he lost a Senate challenge in 1996. ("He’s fine," Weld said of Kerry. "He’s not move-to-Canada material if he wins the election.") O’Reilly ate it up when right-wing pundette Michelle Malkin criticized Tuesday’s "compassion" theme. ("It sort of really grates on my nerves, this compassion day, this metrosexual-makeover day," Malkin told her delighted host.) Perhaps most bizarrely, he played a tape of an interview he’d conducted with Laura Bush sometime earlier — and included an entire section of him essentially lecturing the first lady on the failures of public education after she’d declined to endorse his critique. "I’ll disagree with you," she said following his harangue. "I think the public schools are good. I think they are very good."

Observe that O’Reilly — unlike Hannity, or even Hume — is not a slave to the party line. Still, O’Reilly’s dissent takes place entirely inside the Republican tent. By sometimes appearing to be to the right of the president, as he did in his interviews with Malkin and Laura Bush, he helped Bush appear to be more moderate. He accomplished the same in an interview with — oh, let me indulge myself — far-right bomb-thrower Pat Buchanan, a staunch opponent of the war in Iraq. The underlying message: if a scary guy like Buchanan isn’t with the president, maybe you should be.

O’Reilly, at least, is sometimes interesting. Hannity is a pompous bore who asks the same simple-minded questions of anyone he can stick a microphone in front of. Over and over, he asked guests such as Senator John McCain, Democratic congressman Charles Rangel, and former Democratic senator Bob Kerrey about the Swifties, and about — this is truly weird — what they thought of Kerry’s support for a nuclear-weapons freeze in the 1980s, when the sainted Ronald Reagan was trying to "win the Cold War." No one had much of an answer. Then again, they probably wouldn’t have if he’d asked them about life on Mars, either.

WHAT MAKES Fox News a success, I suspect, is that it provides a safe harbor for folks who are uncomfortable with complexity. Fox provides a narrative structure to the news. It’s a dangerous world out there, full of terrorists, crime, and cop-kicking protesters. The Democrats want to tax away all your money and have forgotten the lessons of 9/11. George W. Bush will keep you safe. Liberals control the media, and Fox News is the only place where you’ll learn the truth.

It’s simple and comforting, at least for people who like simple and comforting. But there’s a price to be paid. Last fall, for instance, a study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes and a polling firm called Knowledge Networks found that heavy Fox viewers were the least well-informed of all news consumers. Fully 45 percent of Fox viewers believed that the US had found ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, had unearthed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that the war was supported by most people in other countries. Among those who relied on CBS News, the figure was 15 percent; for PBS and NPR, it was just four percent.

Such findings argue powerfully that those who believe the mainstream media are every bit as biased to the left as Fox is to the right are just wrong. However, while few would dispute the notion that the mainstream is suffused with a hazy cultural liberalism, that liberalism does not affect day-to-day news coverage the way conservatism — or, rather, Republicanism — does at Fox.

Does it matter? Well, certainly to those who have come to rely on Fox it does. They’re simply not as knowledgeable as they ought to be — as they deserve to be for the investment of time they are putting into watching it. On Tuesday, Fox itself reported that protesters had come to its headquarters chanting, "The more you watch, the less you know." Indeed.

But some critics argue that the Fox effect goes much deeper than that — that the network has dragged the mainstream to the right, as news executives at other organizations have sought to emulate Fox’s ratings success and, just as important, avoid accusations of liberal bias. That’s a major premise of Outfoxed, for instance. At one point in the film, the Nation’s John Nichols claims that Fox’s premature call of Florida for Bush (by Bush’s cousin John Ellis) created a media stampede that imbued Bush with an air of legitimacy he would not otherwise have had.

I’m not so sure. (I’m also tired of conspiracy theories that blame Ellis, a professional pollster who simply made a mistake — hardly the only person to do so that night.) I’m more inclined to accept the view that Fox’s flag-waving coverage of the war in Iraq, and the months that preceded it, had an effect. "I think other news organizations have been intimidated to some degree," says Ellen Hume, a veteran journalist who is now director of the Center on Media and Society at UMass Boston. "Fox has been a very prime example of making money by being rah-rah and being supportive of the troops and supportive of the Bush administration when that was a popular thing to be." Yet it’s not popular now. And the hyper-patriotism that Fox helped inspire has led to regret on the part of some news organizations as to how unquestioning they were during the run-up to the war. It may turn out that the Fox effect was temporary — more the hangover of post-9/11 boosterism than of Fox bullying.

Ultimately, I think the only real losers are the folks who watch Fox News and fail to balance it with other, less-ideologically-charged news sources. "Diversity is a good thing. I believe that the news media, particularly television, would be much better off being honest from top to bottom about their ideological preferences," says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, who’s popped up as an unpaid guest on Fox and several other networks this week. He adds: "There is no question at all by any person with a brain that Fox is a conservative network. But, similarly, I don’t think there’s any question at all that the other major networks, to one degree or another, lean left."

Left? Well, I don’t know. Maybe a little. But they certainly don’t lean Democratic the way Fox leans Republican. MSNBC is a lost cause, but CNN, the Big Three broadcast networks, NPR, PBS, and major newspapers and magazines all make a serious effort to cover the news with some degree of — well, of fairness, balance, and comprehensiveness. That’s why the survey found that Fox viewers are so ill-informed. But they’ve made their choice. Successful though Fox may be, its audience is actually very small. The three network newscasts have a combined audience of as much as 30 million when there’s a big story in the news. NPR’s morning and evening drive-time shows draw as many as 20 million listeners per week. For all the attention it gets, the Fox News Channel is still very much a niche product.

On the floor of Madison Square Garden, Sean Hannity suddenly turned all smiles, signaling to Charlie Rangel that the interview — marred just seconds earlier by shouts of "cheap shots" and "fiction" — was drawing to a close.

"I’m going to try to Hannitize you right here in public," Hannity said.

"Save me, Sean. Save me," Rangel replied.

No. Save us.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com. Read his Media Log at BostonPhoenix.com.