In an address last night to the National Press Club, News Corp Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch ripped into the New York Times as a media outlet with "an agenda" focused on "anything Mr. Obama wants." Murdoch, who owns Fox News and the Times' primary competitor the Wall Street Journal, then fielded a question from the audience about Fox News' own reputation for advancing a conservative agenda — and lately the conservative, grass-roots Tea Party movement — in its coverage, Murdoch waved off the allegation.

"I don't think we should be supporting the Tea Party or any other party," he said. "We have both sides in our news shows, our politics or whatever. We have Democrats and Republicans and whatever."

Yesterday, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, who is strongly identified with both the fiscal- and social-conservative wings of the GOP, wound up cautioning some conservative constituents at a town hall gathering not to "catch yourself being biased by Fox News that somebody is no good."

The Coburn episode was especially striking, since he happens to be one of the most stalwart conservatives in the Senate, netting a 96-point rating on the 100-point scale furnished by the American Conservative Union.

Other conservatives who are closer to the traditional GOP mainstream have lately raised similar red flags about Fox's broader political impact. David Frum, the former American Enterprise Institute fellow who was recently let go in the wake of a widely circulated blog post he wrote criticizing GOP legislative tactics on health care reform, has said that "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we're discovering that we're working for Fox." Frum spelled out what he meant by that remark in a weekend appearance on CNN's "Reliable Sources":