If you follow Fox News at all, you find that they're really terrific on beating meaningless news stories to death rather than dealing with actual news stories. Early this year it was that sorority girl who disappeared somewhere in the Carribbean. Then it was the Michael Jackson trial. Basically they'll flog any kind of non-news, especially if there are problems in the administration.
The latest is the "war on Christmas". If you watch any of the news commentary shows they have, you'll find that lately they can't shut up about the tendency to replace "Merry Christmas" with "Happy Holidays" or "Seasons Greetings" or something nonsectarian like that. This is certainly nothing new --nonsectarian holiday greetings have been popular for decades. But Fox News needed to avoid talking about how about half of the Bush administration is either under indictment or is facing indictment, so they're pretending that department stores just started preferring "Happy Holidays" to "Merry Christmas" last week.
Anyway, the call I got from Fox News was in regards to the Plano TX School District banning Christmas shirts and/or colors. I hadn't heard of it, but my initial impression (that I made clear to their news-guy) was "boy, that's stupid". He was genuinely surprised that I didn't consider the banning of wearing red shirts with green pants to be a great victory for secularism and that I had no desire at all to tape a segment with Bill O'Reilly (or some other party shill) in which he'd scream at me for ten minutes as if it was my idea.
. . .and yes O'Reilly doesn't do his interviews live. There's too much risk that interviewees would mention the hush-money that he recently had to pay to a staffer so she wouldn't release tapes of him talking on the phone with her while he flogged his bishop. If anything fun or unflattering to O'Reilly does happen, you can bet it won't make it on the air.
What was pathetic, though, was that Shelly looked up the Plano thing to see what the news-guy was talking about. Turns out that the whole thing happened LAST YEAR.
Ya know, this kind of desperation in manufacturing controversy is the kind of thing I'd expect of a small-town newspaper, not a 24 hour television news outlet run by a multibillion dollar media conglomerate.
I'd always taken the "Fox News sucks" stories with a grain of salt, as I'd never really seen much difference between the competing cable news outlets, and I get all my news nowadays from RSS feeds. But when cable news calls you up to explain to you how genuinely lame they are, you just can't ignore it.
