Okay…admit it. All y’all watch Fox news, if not regularly than at least occasionally. Who has time to watch news at 10:00pm? And WHY watch news at 10:00pm? You’ll just go to bed with sad little news snippets about random murder, the price of gas rising, or a house fire in Alabama. No…9:00pm is a much better time for me to watch the news. And sadly, it ends up being the highly inaccurate, grossly incompetent, Fox News. I don’t know how it is in your parts, but here it can be downright hilarious.
Josh and I like to count the technical difficulties, from the weather guy waving his hands over the wrong map, to the camera switches being a touch too slow (leaving the poor anchor to smile frozenly until finally the camera man switches to a different subject). We also really like the way Fox focuses on certain topics, turning them into themes. A few years ago it was Meth Labs. Yup. Apparently Denver has become a hot bed for meth labs and Fox News was right there to cover the breaking story. The first night, they showed footage of a meth lab that had been built inside a trailer home. In addition to this monstrosity, they showed us one that had been built inside a van. (That was pretty cool). Then they started showing pictures of random trailers with the tag: Could they be meth labs? Could they?! As if suddenly anyone owning a mobile home in Denver was a meth addict. Can you imagine if you saw your trailer pop up on Fox News with the title: METH LAB OR NO? I mean, these people have lives. Anyway, Fox harped on the meth lab concept for TWO WEEKS. And we kept seeing the same footage over and over again and no meth was ever shown…just random trailers and the same old meth van.
Then there was the Sink Hole Story. Colorado is notorious for being as unprepared for rain as Portland is for snow. Gutters don’t work, drains don’t drain, and people lose their homes annually due to flash floods. Colorado is a very flat place, and rain just doesn’t have a lot of options. Rain, in itself, is always Big News, no matter what station you watch. Anyway, there was a big sink hole near the side of a busy road in Denver. Naturally it filled with rain, and became invisible to the naked eye. Cars were driving over it and destroying their tires. Fox made sure they had a reporter right near the sink hole, so every time someone blew out a tire they were right there to interview them. Throughout the news hour they kept returning to the sink hole with new coverage. Warnings were posted on the TV: Don’t even turn down this street, you’ll blow out a tire, the sink hole is very dangerous. The following evening, we were treated to updated coverage about how the sink hole had ceremoniously been filled this morning—BUT it was still a major road block now so be forewarned. The next night the same reporter was filmed standing on top of the now filled sink hole, triumphant. (Phew! That was close!)
I also love how Fox titles everything. When we learned that Colorado is one of the most educated states west of the Mississippi, the little title that popped up on the bottom of the screen was simply: Colorado Smart! As if we needed a sum up of the story.
The saddest one we saw was: Baby in Dumpster. Sad…but sort of, kind of, funny. Like, how is it possible to convey that tragedy in a simple title? Well, according to Fox News, you just say it like it is:

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