Laziness or Stone Incompetence: Fox and Friends Reports a News Parody as Real News
Anyone who has burned a few brain cells watching Fox News Channel's shameless morning show Fox & Friends, knows they have mostly a tenuous connection to evenhanded news reporting.
Still, it was amazing to watch this crew of knuckleheads recently report a satirical Onion-style news parody as an actual event. According to Think Progress, a humor Web site exagerrated a real event, where students placed a ham steak next to a group of muslim students as an awful joke. The satire amplified the administrators' reaction to the prank, playing into Fox & Friends' tired complaints about political correctness run amok.
Any real news organizartion would have a made phone call or two to check the facts, or at least looked to see if a reputable news agency was reporting something similar. What irritates me the most, is that these are the same people who fly into a rage if someone says Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas -- but they expect a group of muslim students to tolerate a prank in which a plateful of food considered taboo in their religion is placed next to them in a cafeteria.
See it here or below.
The Feed is a blog on TV, media and modern life by St. Petersburg Times TV/media critic Eric Deggans. Possibly the most critical guy at the Times, he has served as music, media and TV critic at various times over 10 years.
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Several folks I know took to calling it Faux News a few years ago. More fitting than ever.
Posted by: WP | April 28, 2007 at 08:20 PM