Whenever Fox News is in the mood to pretend that its “fair and balanced” slogan is anything more than a punchline, it resorts to drawing distinctions between its “straight news” and “opinion” broadcasts -- distinctions that are, basically, phony.

Still, given how frequently Fox pretends to take seriously the differences between news and opinion, it's amusing how frequently Fox obscures those differences when it suits their partisan needs.

Take this Fox Nation item, for example:

Click through and you'll find an excerpt from an “article” declaring that Christie “like Ronald Reagan before him, has an uncanny ear for what troubles Americans” and insisting that “super-slick Obama” has “enraged so many Americans.”

That sounds more like an opinion column than a news report -- but Fox Nation goes out of its way to present it as an objective news article:

Notice the lack of a byline? The link at the end referring to the “full article” -- article, not column?

Well, if you actually do click through to the original “article” you find that it is, in fact, a column by right-wing activist Kevin Hassett, director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Fox's portrayal of an opinion column by a conservative AEI employee as a straight news article is not only deeply dishonest, it also makes a mockery of the cable channel's insistence that people not conflate its (purportedly) neutral news reporting with its opinion shows.