Geography question:  What’s wrong with this Fox News story teaser?

Answer:  Mt. Hood is actually in Oregon.

US President Barack Obama was announced as the 2009 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize today.  Congratulations are certainly in order for this historic and, surprising, award.  But it shouldn’t really be a surprise that someone like President Obama who favors diplomacy and international cooperation over rhetoric, antagonism, belligerence, and (unjustified) war would eventually come to the attention Nobel Committee.

But Fox News thinks otherwise.

Instead of congratulating President Obama and advocating for using the prestige conferred by the Nobel Peace Prize to further the cause of peace, reconciliation, and international cooperation Fox News news uses the opportunity to call it “premature” and an “embarrassment.”  One wonders if Fox News would have said the same about US President George W. Bush if the award had come at the same stage of his presidency.

While browsing the Fox News web site, they once again tried to serve up a virus through one of their “carefully selected partners.”  Fortunately, Google Chrome caught the attempted infection.

Fox is upset over allegded close relations between President Brarack Obama.

See their “story” here and their “forum” here.

Come on, guys, where was the indignation when President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were regulars on the Fox Network?  Where was the indignation when VP Cheney said, to paraphrase, “My staff makes sure that my tv is set to Fox News and Fox News only”?

You can’t have it both ways.

I saw this headline on the Fox News web site today.  Read the Fox article here.

This headline isn’t funny in the “ha ha” sense.  Rather, it’s funny in the “smells rancid” sense.

Why does it matter whether or not the trolley driver who allegedly caused the recent accident in Boston had a sex change?  How does that have any bearing on the facts of the accident?  Did the sex reassignment surgery (SRS) somehow contribute to the accident?

The article itself says that the driver “was hired as a minority because of his transgender status.”  Again, how does the driver’s hiring preference have any relationship to the cause of the accident?

Would Fox News have led with the headline “Trolley-Crash Driver Was Black”?

The simple fact is that the detail of the driver’s gender transformation and sexual minority status are the salacious details that entice people to read this article.  It’s gossipy and morbidly titilating to read about.

Fox News:  You can do better.

I’d barely been there long enough to see something about Saddam Hussein’s pearl-handled AK-47 being returned to Iraq.

The funny part of this as it relates to Fox News, in keeping with the theme of this series of posts, is that one of the ads their systems were serving up was compromised with some sort of malware.  One would think that a giant corporation like Fox News would do a better job of screening the material that they embed (aka: advertisements) in their pages.

Fox News had this little gem regarding VP Joe Biden.

The headline and teaser text imply that the Vice-President is stupid for refering to the “number” of a web site.

Web sites really are numbers behind the scenes.  www.foxnews.com reports several differnt numeric IP addresses (64.209.118.32 and 209.2.148.104 for example).  The dotted notation also actually translates to a 32-bit number … but virtually no one actually uses them.  The Domain Name System (DNS) translates strings like recovery.gov to the appropriate number for actually moving the traffic to the web site.

To be fair to Fox News, the article behind the headline and teaser does mention that web sites do actually have numeric addresses.

Fox News is a never-ending source of entertainment.  Take today’s leading story (02-19-2009 at 11:45 Pacific) that the wire taps from the Elliot Spitzer call-girl scandal were ordered to be released by a judge.

Did Fox News really mean that “Taps” should be played?  I don’t think anyone deserving of “Taps” has died.  Rather, they probably just were over zealous in abbreviating the word “wiretaps.”

Headlines from Fox News today regarding the financial bailout of the banking industry.

And we’re surprised by this how?

The same day that the Fox News web site was leading with an incindeary story about the “Office of the President-Elect,” they also had a funny story about National Public Radio (NPR) coverage of a prayer booth installed on public property in New York City.

The reporter in question, Margo Adler, has worked for NPR for many years and covered many, many stories for the broadcast network and is presently assigned to New York City.  Why should her religious beliefs suddenly matter?  Would Fox News have titled this story, and written the story itself, in the way that they did if a Christian reporter had been sent to cover the story in New York?  How about a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddist, a Baha’i, or any member of dozens of other religions?  I suspect that some faiths would not have garnered such attention or spin from Fox News and that a few others would have been treated similarly.

You can listen to the Margo Adler story that has so upset Fox News here.