Sunday, June 24, 2007

Fox News sucks


Like that's news to any of you.

Well, I just finished my breakfast at the Fox Sports bar and restaurant in the airport. Steve is still gone smoking. There are TVs running Fox news everywhere.

I just watched the silliest, stupidest, most biased report I have ever seen in my life. Fox news spent five minutes telling me, as though it were breaking news, that there was a new website on the internet.

Fox news never ceases to amaze me.

What was the new website that demanded a full five minutes of news coverage, including an analyst? It's pro-Hillary website. Here's the link to it and it's pretty innocuous if I do say so myself. Having this as a headline, does that somehow imply that there are so many anti-Hillary websites on the internet that a single pro-Hillary website merits this much attention?

But it's just a website. What's newsworthy about that? Well, what was newsworthy is that it praised Hillary and denounced Hillary's opponents. You mean someone with the wherewithal to start a pro-Hillary website shouldn't say anything about her chief opponents? It's also newsworthy because they mentioned nothing negative about Hillary. It was also newsworthy because they didn't know who ran the website.

They admitted to knowing nothing about those who run the site and then spent a full minute insinuating that the Hillary campaign may very well be the author. They didn't know though. Since they have such an emphasis on professional journalism, they also put out an APB to the viewers for more information if they happened to know of any connection to this website and the Hillary campaign.

And the analyst they had on to talk about this? He was a reporter who covered Whitewater.

What did he have to add? He dredged up all of the accusations from the Whitewater "scandal" and then very quickly admitted that it amounted to nothing, but seemed to think where there's smoke, there's fire despite having found no wrong-doing.

This was a five minute hit piece with no actual reporting to it, whatsoever. And don't get me wrong, I'm not some ardent Hillary supporter. I think she's better than W, but really, who isn't? But she does not deserve this sort of treatment in the media.

Is it really newsworthy if some asshole has a website devoted to something? No. Otherwise there would be a 24-Hour news network dedicated to new websites.

This is really frustrating and infuriating. No wonder our electoral process is circling the drain in the toilet. And this isn't just the electoral process circling the drain, it's journalism, too.

And you want to know what story led into this one? If you said Paris Hilton, you win a cigar. It turns out they've closed all traffic and restricted all parking in her neighborhood because she's being released "sometime in the next day or two."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I once witnessed fox news reporting about channel 2 not reporting that Gerald ford died, well enough. You see channel 2 put a slide bar at the bottom of the screen telling anyone watching the station that he died. This was not enough for fox, America had to have a reporter tell it to them live on every channel, because it would immediately change there lives forever. Anyway they had a five minute broadcast about the not reporting of another station. I thought I had gone mad.