The Fog of Cable"

Alessandra Stanley has a quite nearly wonderful piece today in The Times about the fog of cable news in the Swift Boat nastiness, repeating lies with more frequency than the facts and allowing people to say things against documented evidence while not challenging them on it.

There is the fog of war and then there is the fog of cable.

Over the last few weeks, 24-hour news networks have done little to find out what John Kerry did in Vietnam, but they have provided a different kind of public service: their examination of his war record in Vietnam illustrates once again just how perfunctory and confusing cable news coverage can be. Facts, half-truths and passionately tendentious opinions get tumbled together on screen like laundry in an industrial dryer - without the softeners of fact-checking or reflection.

Somehow, on all-cable news stations - CNN as well as Fox News - a story that rises or falls on basic and mostly verifiable facts blurs into just another developing news sensation alongside the latest Utah kidnapping or the Scott Peterson murder trial. (It is particularly confusing on Fox News, where so many of its blond female anchors look like Amber Frey.)

Well, I'd disagree with at least some of that last part. I suspect the Fox women have the morals of Amber but almost all of them are significantly older and probably slept on the first date with better men. (Cough)

Laurie Dhue, for example, has been looking like the starving ingenue across three networks for years, looking like mud nor a doughnut ever came close to her silk-suited body. Rita Crosby strikes me as one of Rupert Murdoch's cheap dates.

But Fox and women seem like a strange mix anyway. All of the women - and many of the men - behave as if they have "slaves of Rupert" tattooed on their liposuctioned little butts. Others, like O'Reilly, just play the audience for complete fools (and O'Reilly has a lot to work with in that department). (Cough, cough)