I know a lot of people hate Fox News, and I'm not here to polarize anything one way or the other. I'm just very interested in analyzing what I saw while flipping through channels.

Things that Shepard Smith reported on last night in the space of about five minutes:

• Some kids in a rural town in the South had planned a violent attack on a teacher, but were caught before they could carry it out. There were about six of them, and old Shep asks the field reporter, "Are they going to let these kids back in school?" as if to say that they should just be turned out onto the street.
• Drug violence in Mexico is escalating, specifically in the border town of Juarez (where I spent a week building a house once). Some people have been brutally killed and the Mexican government has sent military troops to try and restore order. Shep asks the field reporter if the violence will "spill over" into the U.S. and the guy actually says, "We're worried about that because if the Mexicans drive these drug dealers out, they are going to need a place to go, and it could get ugly," as if masked gunmen were going to invade every single house in San Antonio looking for snitches and narcs and shooting everyone they see.
• Some guy was standing on a building in New York City and throwing molotov cocktails onto cars. Shep's comment: "What a freakshow."

I guess what it comes down to is if you prefer your news to be loaded upfront with commentary or not. It was weird because I knew exactly the kind of responses they were going for, and I have responded to those things in the past - I think the best word for it is "pandering" (thanks, Calvin & Hobbes).

But then again, a news source that strives to be objective is also pandering, isn't it? Just to a different set of criteria, one that certain people have rated as "better" than another set. I probably feel as good when I read a complex news story about a difficult problem with no obvious solution as other people do when a talking head calls somebody a freakshow or talks loudly over what someone else is trying to say.