I had the misfortune of catching a brief glimpse of Fox News the other morning, that my wife was watching out of some deep sense of masochism that I don’t understand. I don’t know if the anchors had escaped from the local Utah morgue, that it was part of a nationally broadcast autopsy, transmissions from another galaxy, or just a sick satirical twist on the Muppet’s – but they were vapid. Lifeless heads, on dandruff free shoulders, smiling like deranged department store mannequin’s.

Normally, this would be enough to make me cringe, but the “story” being told was a hit below the belt. I don’t remember the exact wording, as I’ve been trying hard to repress it since Thursday, but it was something to the extent of a mock sense of excitement over Drew Barrymore and some guy from the cast of a medical sitcom, caught “making out” (I know they used the term “making out”, because they repeated that phrase about eight times) at a restaurant somewhere.

This is news? If Drew Barrymore had been caught flashing senior citizens on the New York subway (excluding David Letterman) that might have been news, of a sort. Perhaps. If you stretch the definition of “news” quite a bit.

This just in, Justine Timberlake, star of TV’s major hit, “Dude, Where’s My Jockstrap?”, was spotted at a local nightclub giving a sloppy hickey to Ernest Borgnine’s superfluous third nipple! Film at eleven!

I thought to myself that this was just a fluke, some “entertainment” exclusive, privy only to the woeful beings who glue their eyes to the muted radiation of the boob-tube during the daytime broadcast fiasco. Then I had the misfortune of catching Fox News again that evening, when they were airing a “new story” about the current events on “American Idol”.

Jesus Tap-dancing Christ on a Pogo stick!

I ask again; this is news? I really need to find out if my wife is ill, or just watching this out of morbid curiosity, like a train wreck that you can’t pull your eyes away from.

I’ve never been impressed with American news broadcasts. Even when I was a kid, back in the dark ages of the Nixon era, the calm and dispassionate announcements from the BBC (aired on PBS), was such a breath of fresh air compared to the pulp on the local stations, that it was the only news I would watch, when I would actually take the time to watch the news. I was a kid, after all, there were better things to do, unless I was sick.

Since I don’t watch television, other than the occasional episode of “The Simpsons”, I can’t say if the current trend is an overall phenomena or just a Fox thing. I’ve certainly read several rants over the disinformation which passes as news on Fox. Frankly, I don’t care if they have a right wing bias, as they are accused of having, because it’s doing the right wing no favor to be holding Fox News up as a symbol of their intelligence. If I were to guess the IQ’s of those watching Fox News and believing what they present as being real news, I’d be spouting figures in the low teens. As for bias, there certainly are enough left wing news programs to make up for anything of the Fox sway. “Fair and balanced” is meaningless to any of the networks.

Maybe I’m reading more into this that I should, but with news looking more like entertainment than news, is it any wonder that the typical American is as ignorant of world events as they are?