Everything is peaceful and calm at Nas' rally. Between 100 and 150 people are standing outside of Fox News' Manhattan headquarters on 48th and 6th. Nas is running a little late for the 2 p.m. start time. There are protesters standing behind barricades with picket signs that give the network the new slogan "Your source for racist smears" and ask, "Fair and balanced? Fairly racist."

A random passerby yells "F--- Rupert Murdoch!"

Nas is on the way.

You don't have to be invited onto Nas' tour bus to know that the big screen in the back lounge isn't tuned to Fox News. Ever.

If the track "Sly Fox" ("Watch what you watchin', Fox keeps feeding us toxins/ Stop sleeping, start thinking") on Untitled didn't already tip you off that the MC isn't a fan, then his position at the front of the pack at a press conference held outside the "fair and balanced" news network's Manhattan headquarters should seal the deal.

At 2:30 p.m. tomorrow, Nas is joining the Web sites ColorOfChange.org and MoveOn.org to deliver a petition with more than 620,000 signatures demanding that the network end what the organizations call a "pattern of racist attacks against black Americans including presidential candidate Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle." Read more...

(by Bernard Lumpkin)

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but how much is a chyron worth? Apparently, for Fox News, a whole lot. During an interview Wednesday with conservative columnist Michelle Malkin about attacks against Michelle Obama, Fox News ran a graphic on the lower third of the screen that read, "Outraged Liberals: Stop Picking on Obama's Baby Mama!"

The comment — both crass and, for those who know anything about 21st-century slang, just plain wrong! — has set the political blogs abuzz. To those of us here in the Newsroom accustomed to using chyrons day in and day out in our on-air reporting, we thought we'd take this opportunity to draw your attention to the use (and abuse?) of this television tool.

News producers generally consider chyrons our friends. That informative text on the lower part of your screen allows us to feed you even more info — from sports scores to AP wire reports to upcoming programs — than what you're seeing and hearing on the upper two-thirds of the screen. Chyrons summarize, condense and crystallize. And in these times of short-attention spans, the quicker you can absorb the news the better. In other words, chyrons are meant to complement the story, not comment on it. Right?
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Tuesday night, the nation was glued to their TV screens as John McCain became the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton continued to duke it out.

With the election race more dramatic than ever, we thought we'd take a look at how other news organizations work — and Fox News was kind enough to extend us an invitation. So producer Daniel "Grizzly" Montalto, cameraman Brendan "Tintin" Kennedy and myself headed over to the channel's headquarters in midtown Manhattan to get a first-hand look at how it was gonna go down on primary night.

First stop: the Decision Desk. Upstairs from the main Fox newsroom, news correspondent Bill Hemmer and his giant plasma touch-screen — "Bigger than CNN's," he boasted — were both hard at work trying to stay on top of the night's results.

Here's how it works - After the Jump.

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