As we were departing our last Hawaiian port of call, the captain got on the horn with bad news. He said the part of the Pacific Ocean we were heading into, which was most of it, was poorly served with American TV. Therefore CNN and ESPN and all the other feeds that had supplied most of the channels in our stateroom TVs were now but a memory. They wouldn’t be back until just before we docked in San Diego at the end of the cruise, but he was happy to announce that we wouldn’t be totally deprived of a voice from home. The Fox channel (which reached the Earth’s surface not from a communications satellite, like everybody else, but through a navigation satellite, which covered everywhere) would be glad to serve us while the real news people were absent.
In the event, it wasn’t any worse than I had expected. It wasn’t any better, either. As a news source, Fox suffered from not offering very much of it, preferring to allocate its time slots to its right-wing pundits — Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich were among the ones they promised — for the purpose of explaining the true meaning of the news rather than delivering any. When big news stories broke, Fox did cover them, at least at first, on a reasonably factual basis: the crash landing of a bird-damaged jet in the Hudson River, the inauguration of President Barack Obama, the brief and not really explained in-and-out candidacy of Caroline Kennedy as appointee to Hillary Clinton’s vacated Senate seat.
Each of these events Fox kept alive for days, perhaps so that they could explicate the moral lessons involved: the faith-based explanations for the survival of the jet’s occupants, the theory that, since she was a member of the evil Kennedy tribe, Caroline probably had a trunkful of sordid secrets a fitness hearing would expose to the world. And, in order to give Obama’s inaugural address a fair and impartial review, they engaged a person who truly did know something about inaugural addresses. He had written both of George W. Bush’s.
(Confession: I haven’t actually experienced seventeen full days of Foxiness. Along about the tenth day, I finally figured out that, if I tuned to that channel but turned the sound down to zero, I would never have to hear the crazy-making utterances of Hannity, O’Reilly, et al anymore but could get a rough idea of what was going on in the world from the news crawl at the bottom of the screen, which, relatively speaking, was only mildly toxic.)
Fathercrow says:
Yeah, you got to love Fox news, it’s just so wonderfully fictional. On a lighter note, it’s 50 degrees here in S.E. Wisconsin, so maybe you can stand it in Illinois.
February 7, 2009, 2:10 pmmoz says:
If you write it “Faux News” you get a better idea of the content. Also, a guy here sells stickers “Is that the truth, or is your News Limited”… another Murdoch fan, obviously.
February 7, 2009, 4:40 pmClark Tracy says:
You mean if they say it on the TeeVees then it doesn’t have to be true?
February 8, 2009, 10:37 amteletypeturtle says:
The thought of being on a ship with nothing but Fox for 17 days … oh my. You did find a way to suffer it with good humor.
February 8, 2009, 9:58 pmStefan Jones says:
Fox News reminds me something that these two guys who wrote satirical SF in the fifties would come up with, to explain why the citizens of a dystopia weren’t marching in the streets.
Man, what were their names . . .
February 9, 2009, 12:51 pmMary Peed says:
Oh you poor man. I bet Betty had a good time with it as well.
February 10, 2009, 8:54 amJohn H says:
It’s bad enough going to restaurants that insist on subjecting its customers to Faux News — I would have to just turn the TeeVee off if that was the only channel available. (Not if you were the last channel on Earth, Faux!)
I am thrilled to have discovered your blog.
February 12, 2009, 2:45 pmWeekend Bookchat « The Opinion Mill says:
[...] an intrepid man, found a way to rise above such adversity: Along about the tenth day, I finally figured out that, if I tuned to that channel but turned the [...]
February 21, 2009, 6:23 pmHell on the high seas « STEVENHARTSITE says:
[...] an intrepid man, found a way to rise above such adversity: Along about the tenth day, I finally figured out that, if I tuned to that channel but turned the [...]
February 21, 2009, 6:31 pmBanjo says:
You prefer your news slanted left, I take it. Well, there’s no shortage out there. Virtually all the rest of the media is on call, but MSNBC gives you the purest version.
February 22, 2009, 12:47 pmKip W says:
I’m surprised the ship didn’t go down, with such a pronounced list to starboard.
March 9, 2009, 7:16 pm