February 10, 2006

Ho, hum

Pretty typical day for The Grapevine. Hume leads with a story about how a Fox News poll shows that Republicans are going to romp all over the Democrats in 2008 (apparently, McCain is back in favor at Fox News now that he represents the party's best hope at surviving 8 uninterrupted years of scandals, mismanagement and corruption).

I'd also like to modify something I wrote about yesterday a bit. In yesterday's entry I noted that Hume's "The Grapevine" segment reads like a right-wing blog without hyperlinks. This isn't strictly true. The printed, online version of "The Grapevine" does include hyperlinks. It's just that the hyperlinks themselves are basically worthless. That's because they don't link to the sources that Hume is using for his stories (as a normal blog would) but rather, they mostly link to the Fox News search engine. So that when you click the hyperlink to a story on a newspaper that refused to run some ads by a Pro-life activist group, you aren't linked to a broader story about the incident, nor are you linked to that paper. Rather, what you get is a series of search resuls, the first one of which points straight back to "The Grapevine" and the second which points to a story on a Mastodon find in Illinois. What's that all about?

Lastly, while this is a blog about Brit Hume, I'd like to take a minute to note about Gretta Van Susteren. Whenever Fox News is criticized for being the Republican propaganda outlet that it is, the nework's defenders always reply that there are plenty of liberals working at Fox, including Alan Colmes and Gretta Van Susteren. Now, I won't get into Colmes, as there's been plenty already written about how he was chosen by Sean Hannity to act as a dim-witted, non-threatening foil for Hannity's over-the-top right-wing histrionics. As for Susteren, I'll note that, although she first made her name as a legal analyst and defender of President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, she's spent most of her time at Fox News reporting on trashy celebrity scandal stuff; Laci Petterson, runaway brides, pretty, doe-eyed, missing college students, etc. Looks like last-night's show was no exception. In the midst of Republican scandals about illegal wiretapping, Jack Abramoff-linked corruption, and a meltdown in the Middle-east, what was Fox News' resident "liberal" reporting on? Why, a weeks old story about a honey-mooner murdered on a cruise liner. Gee, thanks for keeping the faith there, Gretta!