If there's one thing Fox & Friends, Fox News' non-news morning show, likes talking about, it's how great Fox News is. This morning, the three co-hosts used Bill O'Reilly's recent interview with President Obama as an opportunity to continue pushing their absurd distinction between what counts as news, and what counts as opinion. As Media Matters has pointed out numerous times, the line between Fox's “news” reporting and its “opinion” reporting is often blurred and many times non-existent. While their primetime talking heads usually make every effort to smear Obama and Democrats with a never-ending parade of lies, distortions, and misinformation, it's in combination with the straight news echo chamber that Fox really lives up to its self-described title: the& “voice of the opposition.”

This morning on Fox & Friends, we got confirmation of that fact from the unlikeliest of sources, co-host Gretchen Carlson. For some context, in his interview with O'Reilly, Obama downplayed tension with Fox, saying, “Fox News has a point of view, and I think that's part of our democracy.” In the ensuing victory lap, co-host Steve Doocy and guest Laura Ingraham desperately pushed the Fox “fair and balanced” talking point. Carlson, however, made a more interesting observation:

CARLSON: It also signaled to me, Laura, that this was just one piece of the puzzle of the changing Obama since the midterm election.

INGRAHAM: Oh, yeah.

CARLSON: He has to accept Fox now based on what happened in the midterm elections. And yet, you put that up against the dichotomy of him saying that he hasn't moved to the center. So which one is it?

Now why would Obama have to accept Fox after a midterm election that featured the largest Republican electoral gains in recent history? Because Fox is fair and balanced? Or because it's the political and campaign arm of the GOP? While Doocy was trying to spin his show as a mixture of news and opinion, Carlson was proudly declaring herself the voice of the opposition.