Fox’s Reilly tired of network TV bashing. Really.

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Kevin Reilly’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore.

Well, not really mad. Just super annoyed.

At a panel sponsored at the Paley Center for Media this afternoon by the Association of National Advertisers and the Alliance for Family Entertainment, the Fox Entertainment president channeled his inner Howard Beale and voiced his frustration with the ‘inordinate amount of negative press’ network television gets these days.

Doesn’t he get how us newspaper types work? The best way for a dying business to take the heat off itself is to focus on another challenged business.

We know what you’re thinking: A network president touting the value of network TV is news? But there was something oddly refreshing about Reilly’s candor, especially compared with the other four network entertainment chiefs sitting up there on stage who opted not to join Reilly on the network-TV-still-rocks bandwagon (which is why we’re not mentioning your names and you don’t get your photo at the top of this post).

And Reilly has a point. The press loves to beat the network-television-is-dead horse. Of course, it doesn’t help that network audiences keep shrinking each year as viewers flock to cable, video games, the Internet, iPods and iPhones. (Yeah, yeah, we know CBS was up this season, so hold off on that e-mail, Moonves).

Reilly knows network television is not ‘sexy news’ and does acknowledge that media business is ‘in a great transition.’ (Well, we’re not sure what’s great about it, but we get what he’s saying). That said, broadcast TV is ‘still the sun that other planets revolve around.’

As for cable, the Internet and other challengers to broadcast television, Reilly says ‘there’s not enough there there,’ adding, ‘until some of these things prove they have value, stick to what works.’ Hope Fox isn’t going to use him to tout Hulu to advertisers anytime soon.

The best part of Reilly’s rant? He wasn’t even responding to a particular question when he launched into his diatribe.

-- Joe Flint