In discussing Zev Chafets’ new biography of Fox News honcho Roger Ailes, Commentary magazine “Press Man” columnist Andrew Ferguson can’t help but poke fun at a mainstream media scribe.

It was all too much for poor Michiko Kakutani, the daily book reviewer for the New York Times. Chafets likes Ailes, and Kakutani dislikes the book, and you can be sure the two judgments are not unrelated. Kakutani was amazed, she wrote, that a veteran journalist like Chafets refused to peel away Ailes’s hand-molded mask to expose the evil rolling behind it. In her phrase, the author — and in fairness it’s my fault, not hers, that we’re suddenly mixing metaphors here — “serves as little more than a plastic funnel for Mr. Ailes’s observations.” (Why the funnel has to be plastic, I don’t know.)  Chafets, she complained, never asks the tough questions about Ailes and Fox News, the network he founded nearly 20 (!) years ago and is now, in some minds, identical to.

And what are those tough, unasked questions? Oh, well, you know, “about Fox News’s incestuous relationship with the Republican Party, its role in accelerating partisanship in our increasingly polarized society, or the consequences of its often tabloidy blurring of the lines between news and entertainment.”

I wonder sometimes about the computers in the Times newsroom. Is there a special hot key on the keyboards that allows a faithful Timesperson to call up phrases like “our increasingly polarized society” and “accelerating partisanship” with a single stroke, thus reducing the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome and saving energy, time, and thought? You’ll notice that Kakutani’s questions are mostly of the when-did-you-stop-beating-your-husband variety: “Tell me, Roger, how did you get the idea to have an incestuous relationship with the Republican party?”